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COFlfRICHT DEPOSIT 



dbrist, Cbristianiti? 
ant> tbe Bible 



y^ ,irV BY 

ip'm/'haldeman, d.d. 

J 

Pastor First Baptist Church, New York City 

Author of 

How to Study the Bible, The Coming of Christ, The Signs of 

the Times, Christian Science in the Light 

of Holy Scripture, etc., etc. 




NEW YORK 

CHARLES C. COOK 

150 Nassau Street 






Copyright, 1919, 
By Charles C. Cook 



CI.A327753 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

Christ 5 

CHRISTIAI^riTY V . 47 

The Bible 92 



Cbrist 

IF NOT GOD— NOT GOOD 

BY I. M. HADDEMAK, D.D. 

"Why callest thou me good ? there is none good but one, that is 
God" (Matthew 9: 17). 

^^fc^^ HE world has accepted Jesus Christ as 
m C^\ a good man. 

^L^ J The evidences of his goodness are man- 
^^^ ifold. 

He was full of compassion. 

He never looked upon the people as a crowd. 
He never thought of them as a mass. He saw 
them always as individuals. His heart went out 
to them. All his impulses were to pity them, sym- 
pathize with, and help them. 

He went among them. He entered into all con- 
ditions, accepted all situations. He was present 
at a wedding, he ate with publicans and sinners 
and, anon, was guest at a rich man's table. 

He saw the ravages of disease, the shame of sin, 
the tragedies in life. 

He knew there was torture in body and anguish 
in spirit. 

He took the mystery of pain and laid it upon 
his heart, until tears were his meat and his drink, 
by day and by night. He became a man of sor- 
rows and an expert in grief. He took upon him 

5 



6 Chbist, Cheistianity aitd the Bible 

the woes of the world till he was bowed and bent, 
as with the weight of years. The tears of sym- 
pathy grooved his cheeks, as when streams carve 
their way down mountain sides. Because of this 
men looked at him and saw neither form nor 
comeliness; neither was there any beauty in him 
that they should desire him. 

He was a beneficent man. 

Multitudes of men are benevolent, but not be- 
neficent. 

Benevolence is well wishing. Beneficence is well 
doing. He was always well doing, giving sight to 
the blind, healing the sick, cleansing the leper, 
feeding the hungry, raising the dead, unloosing 
the bonds of Satan — unwinding the serpent ^s coil. 

He was absolutely unselfish. 

He emptied himself and made room in his soul 
for other lives. He had no office hours and never 
interposed secretaries or major-domos between 
himself and the people. He received all who came 
unto him — ministering without money and without 
price. 

There is one scene that might well be painted 
by a master hand. 

It is evening. The western sky is all aglow 
with the glory of the setting sun. Far up in the 
dome of the infinite blue, the evening star swings 
golden, like a slow descending lamp let down by 
invisible hands. The street is in half-tone. It is 
packed by the strangest of throngs, by the blind, 
the lame, the halt, the paralyzed and the leper — 



Christ 7 

derelicts of humanity — borne thither on a surging 
tide of life in which every wave is an accent of 
pain ; they are driven and piled up in great, quiv- 
ering heaps against a door which is partly shut, 
as in self-defence, by the sweltering crowd within. 

Jesus of Nazareth is in that house. 

He is healing the sick. He is giving health, and 
strength, and peace to all who seek him. He turns 
no one away. Compassion, sympathy, beneficence, 
the tenderness of a mother for her helpless babe — 
these are the characteristics which his daily min- 
istry revealed. 

No one ever brought a charge of evil doing or evil 
speaking against him. 

The people who followed him said, ^^He hath 
done all things well.'^ 

Police officers sent to arrest him as a disturber 
of the peace found him in the midst of the people, 
speaking words that hushed their tumult, quieted 
their murmurings and gave them rest; and the 
officers returning to them who sent them, said, 
^^ Never man spake like this man.'' 

Pilate's wife dreamed a troubled dream of him, 
and sent word to her husband not to lay hands 
on him — seeing that he was a just man. Thrice 
before heaven and earth — in a testimony that still 
echoes through infinite spaces, and is heard by 
listening worlds — Pilate himself proclaimed, '^I 
find no fault in this man." 

He lifted up his voice against sin and un- 
righteousness. 



8 Christ, Cheistianity and the Bible 

Against nothing did he so much speak as against 
religious hypocrisy. Nowhere, in any record, is 
language so terrible, so penetrating, so hot, so 
full of the flame of fire and scorching analysis, 
scorching and burning in its denunciation of those 
who on the outside (in their religious profession) 
were like whitened sepulchres, but on the inside 
(in their actual lives) were full of dead men's 
bones and corruption — ^nowhere, outside the 
twenty-third chapter of Matthew, does language 
fall with such tremendous vibration of thunderous 
indignation, and the accent of aroused and fully 
angered justice. ^^Ye serpents, '^ ^^ye generation 
of vipers, '^ are some of the phrases; and the 
words, ^^fools,'' ^^ blind hypocrites, '^ mingle again 
and again with the far-sounding, judicial menace, 
^^Woe, woe unto you.'' 

He seemed to be dominated and controlled by 
one idea — the idea of God. The God thought held 
and moved him. He could not go anywhere, or 
see anything, or utter the shortest discourse, that 
he did not, in some fashion, connect it with the 
infinite Father. Was a sower sowing seed, he saw 
in that incident an illustration of the fact that 
the true seed is the Word of God, and the true 
sower he who casts it into the mightier ground 
of the human heart. Did a flock of sheep lie at 
rest upon the hillside, guarded by a shepherd's 
care, at once he would unfold the shepherding of 
a Father's love. A tiny sparrow, flying an un- 
noticed speck in the distant sky, or falling ground- 



Christ 9 

ward with its weary flight, was a winged witness 
that the Father knew and saw even the smallest 
details of human life. A lily in its lowliness, and 
yet a lily in its beanty shaming a king's array, a 
lily, toiling not, but upward growing, furnished 
him a text from which to preach the providence 
of God; and a wandering beggar boy far away 
from home and kindred, stained with sin and dark 
with sorrow, gave occasion for the wondrous story 
of the Prodigal Son and a father's changeless and 
tender love. 

God! God! God! this was the supreme note of 
his life. 

On the cross he gave utterance to words which 
reveal the inner character of his soul. 

When a man has been lied about, falsified, his 
good evil spoken of and his reputation assailed 
(as was his before the Sanhedrin — in the mock 
trial given him there), when such a man has been 
hounded from one end of the town to the other, 
spit upon and jibed at and, finally, nailed through 
hands and feet to a torturing cross ; when such a 
man with his heart bursting (because of the im- 
peded circulation, driving the surging, tumultuous 
blood back upon it), with the sun scorching his 
bare temples, a crown of thorns stabbing him at 
every helpless turn of his restless head; when 
such a man, under such circumstances, can rise 
above the wickedness, cowardice and cheap treason 
that have nailed him to the cross, and pray (and 
pray sincerely) that his guilty murderers, villain- 



10 Cheist, Cheistianity and the Bible 

ons detractors and unscrupulous slanderers may 
be forgiven, that man bears witness that he has, 
at least, a heart of good. 

And it was just such a prayer which came from 
the parched, dry, cracked lips of this man of 
Nazareth as he hung upon the cross and cried out, 

^^ Father, forgive them, for they know not what 
they do.'^ 

Again he spoke from the cross. 

There was standing near, a woman who had been 
chosen of God to give him birth. She was sobbing 
convulsively. She was realizing what had been 
foretold of her more than thirty years before — *^a 
sword shall pierce through thy own soul, also.^' 
Mary, the mother of Jesus, stood there, broken- 
hearted. Jesus turned his head and looked at 
John, his cousin, bidding him take that weeping 
mother to his home, his heart and care, and be 
unto her henceforth a loving son. 

the man who, in the hour of his own agony, 
shall remember his mother, and crown her, make 
her the queen of his life, and ordain that others 
shall love and reverence her, proclaims for himself 
the lustre of a manhood without spot. 

Once more he spoke from the place of anguish — 
that moment on the edge of death. There his 
soul, rising from the depths of the overwhelming 
waves of agony, cries: 

^^ Father, into thy hands I commit my spirif 

He who in the hour and article of death can 
face God and eternity, and commit himself to the 



Chbist 11 

hand of supreme justice as a confident child to 
the arms of a loving father, bears witness that 
in his soul there is no ghastly memory of sin, no 
sharp, remembered pang, no fear of offended law. 
Such a confidence and such a committal of tri- 
umphant calm bear witness that the heart is at 
rest with God, and is conscious of its own good. 

For two thousand years the world, without a 
dissenting voice, has borne witness that he is the 
one man who came into the earth and walked 
through it superlatively good. 

Among the voices in the common consent of the 
world that Jesus Christ was a good man, there are 
those who with equal insistence deny that he was 
Almighty God. 

They agree that he had the spirit of God ; that 
he had it in measure such as no other man before 
or since. They announce their belief that he is the 
mightiest advance on humanity ever known ; that 
all other religious teachers pale before him as the 
stars before the sun. They speak of his spotless 
life with fervent admiration, and draw special 
attention to his discourses as models of exhorta- 
tion to righteousness and truth. To them the ser- 
mon on the mount is a chef d^oeuvre. Out of that 
sermon they take the maxim about doing unto 
others as you would they should do unto you. 
They take that maxim and frame it about and 
make it the ' ^ Golden Eule ' ' of human life. They 
exalt Jesus as the perfect example, telling us that 
if we shall govern our life by him, make him our 



12 Cheist, Christianity and the Bible 

constant copy, imitate him, we shall fill our daily 
existence with righteousness and truth. In fact, 
if we seek a panegyric on the humanity of Christ; 
if we desire to see his goodness exalted to the 
heavens, and his humanity put beyond compare 
with the sons of men — ^we must needs go to the 
Socinian, the Arian and the Unitarian — those who 
deny the deity of Christ. But this exaltation of 
the human Christ is simply setting up a man of 
straw that with one blow of deific discount he 
may be knocked down again. He is set up as man 
that he may be cast down as God. 

They will not accept him as God. 

God Almighty (we are told) cannot be confined 
or shut up in any one man. Man as man and, 
therefore, every individual man in his part, is 
the avatar of God. Each man is in some sense the 
incarnation of God. God is more or less enthroned 
in all men. God is to be found in all men as he is 
to be found in all nature. 

A good man — call Jesus a good man — set him 
up as high as you please, build as lofty a pedestal 
for him as you will, but Almighty God — Never! 

Over against this exaltation of Christ as a merely 
good man, and the persistent denial that he was God, 
stands the unmistakable claim which Jesus Christ 
himself made — that he was God. 

He made that claim in many ways. 

He claimed it by declaring his power and au- 
thority to forgive sin. 

That was a striking moment when he proclaimed 



Chkist 13 

it for the first time. Four men had brought a 
paralytic to the house where he was preaching. 
When they could not get in because of the crowd, 
they climbed up on the roof, took off some of the 
tiling, and by means of ropes or corners of the 
mattress let the man down to the very feet of 
Jesus. When he saw their faith, he turned to the 
sick man and said, ^^Son (son of Abraham), thy 
sins are forgiven thee.'' 

At once there was an uproar. The leading men, 
sitting round and watching him, burst out with a 
protest, charging him with blasphemy, saying that 
God only could forgive sin. 

And they were right. 

No mere man can forgive sin. Again and again 
the Scriptures teach us that forgiveness is with 
God that he may be feared. 

In announcing the man's sins forgiven, Jesus 
clearly claimed the prerogative, power and au- 
thority, which belong to God. 

He claimed this equality by declaring himself 
to be the Son of God. To the Jews, ^^Son of God" 
was equivalent to ^^God the Son." It meant to 
them, the moment he styled himself by that name, 
an unqualified claim to essential equality with the 
Father. Because of this they raged against him 
and would have killed him, crying out that he had 
made himself equal with God. 

He made this claim in terms which admit of no 
misunderstanding. He said: 

**I and my Father are one." 



14 Cheist, Cheistianity and the Bible 

When Philip said, ^^Shew us the Father, and it 
sufficeth us,'' he answered and said: 

^'Hast thou been with me so long time and hast 
thou not known me, Philip? From henceforth ye 
know him and have seen him/' 

To Philip he had also said: 

^^I am the way and the truth and the life — ^no 
man cometh unto the Father but by me." 

By this statement he deliberately shut out all 
other men as the ground and means of approach 
to God. He declares that God, the Father, can 
be found in and through him alone ; that he is the 
supreme way, the very truth and the very life; 
not that he knows some truth and has a measure 
of life in common with men, but that he is the 
truth — the absolute life. Such attitude, such 
claimed rights, privileges and powers, belong 
alone to God. 

But he goes beyond this. 

He testifies that he has been from* all eternity 
the manifestation of the very selfhood of the 
Father. Hear what he says : 

^^ And now, Father, glorify thou me with thine 
own self, with the glory which I had with thee 
before the world was." 

He traces his personality backward beyond the 
hour when the world was launched into space, be- 
fore the stellar systems were created. He goes 
beyond time, he takes us into eternity, and in that 
unbegun and measureless distance declares with 
all the calm assurance of accustomed truthfulness 



Christ 15 

that he had the glory, the visibility, the outward 
manifestation and splendor of the Father's own 
essential selfhood; that his relation to him was 
that of one who was from all eternity his deter- 
mination, definition and utterance. 

Such claims as these are the claims of one who 
declares himself to be, and without restraint, 
nothing less than Almighty God. 

On one occasion when talking to the Jews he 
said that Abraham had rejoiced to see his day, 
had seen it and was glad. They turned upon him 
and reminded him that he was not yet fifty years 
old, how then could he have seen Abraham, or 
Abraham him — ^that Abraham who had been dead 
nearly two thousand years? 

He faced them and said: 

^^ Verily, verily I say unto you, before Abraham 
was, I am.^' 

The striking thing in the statement is not the 
claim of pre-existence — great as that is — ^not that 
he claimed to have been in existence already — not 
fifty years merely, but two thousand — ^no ! all these 
utterances are remarkable enough, but these are 
not the astounding thing he said. The astounding, 
the unspeakably extraordinary thing he said is 
found in just two words : 

^^I am.'' 

There is one place in Holy Scripture where this 
phrase is supremely used. In the third chapter 
of the book of Exodus it is recorded that God 
manifested himself to Moses at the burning bush, 



16 Cheist, Christianity and the Bible 

and there declared himself to be the God of Abra- 
ham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob. He 
commanded Moses to return to Egypt, appear 
before Pharaoh and demand the release of the 
Children of Israel from their cruel bondage ; and 
when Moses inquired by what name he should 
speak to the people, he answered: 
^^Say unto them, I AM hath sent me unto you.^' 
^^I AM/' 

To the Jew these two words set forth the 
supreme name and title of the eternal God. 

In saying, therefore, ^^ Before Abraham was — 
I AM, ' ' Jesus announced himself to be the eternal, 
self-centred, supreme being. Almighty God. When 
he said this, and because they understood 
him, because they knew exactly what he meant 
by these words, the Jews took up stones to stone 
him. 

If I were seeking to demonstrate by object les- 
son, and in a fashion that would admit of no reply, 
that Jesus claimed to be Almighty God, I would 
summon the mightiest and most masterful artist 
the world knows to come and paint for me the 
scene which takes place a little later as a conse- 
quence of that moment when he emphasizes his 
claim by saying: 
''I and my Father are ONE.'' 
The picture would represent a great crowd of 
scowling, fierce, angry Jews, their hands filled with 
stones — some of them drawn back, the whole fig- 
ure intense with readiness to cast the fatal stone — 



Chkist 17 

and Jesus, standing a little distance apart, looking 
calmly on. 

Underneath the picture I would have written in 
great golden letters (letters so artistic, so start- 
ling, so wonderful in form, that at the risk of art 
itself — almost at the risk of minimizing the 
picture at the first glance, subordinating it to in- 
terest in the letters and dividing the mind of the 
onlooker between the actual scene and the letters 
themselves) — I would have written in letters that 
should smite the eye and the innermost thinking 
of the beholder, the words recorded in the tenth 
chapter of John's Gospel, given by the Jews in 
reply to the demand of Jesus when, speaking with 
amazement, he asks, ^^For what good work do ye 
stone me r ' I would have every gazer at the pic- 
ture read these words till they rose up in vastness 
against him, smiting his attention as the very 
stones in the hands of the Jews — these words : 

"For a good work we stone thee not but for blas- 
phemy; and because that thou BEING A MAN 
MAKEST THYSELF GOD." 

The Jews were not deceived. 

They knew what he had done. 

They knew that he claimed to be no less than 
very God himself. 

There can be no doubt that he claimed to be God. 

There need be, really, no discussion about it. 

The New Testament records the claim. 

I am not making any issue as to whether the 
New Testament is true, or reliable. I am saying 



18 Christ, Christian-ity aistd the Bible 

thus far, only, that the New Testament (the Gos- 
pels of the New Testament), in language concern- 
ing which there can be no possible mistake or even 
ground for misinterpretation, records the fact that 
Jesus Christ did claim to be Almighty God. 

If Jesus Christ were not Almighty God (as he 
claimed to be) he was not a good man (as it is said 
he was). 

The proposition ought to be self-evident. 

No mere man can claim to be God and be good. 

He who, as mere man, claims to be God, robs 
God of the glory that is exclusively his. 

He who thus claims to be God, and bids men 
go into eternity trusting him as God, is a deceiver. 

No man who robs God of equality, and who 
deceives men into believing that he is God, 
can be good — he is a wicked and blasphemous 
deceiver. 

There is only one way in which the character of 
Jesus Christ can be saved on this claim of his 
to be God — if that claim were not true. 

It can be saved only by assuming that he was 
self- deceived; that he sincerely believed himself 
to be God, but was blinded and held fast by his 
own mistaken concept. 

But the man who claims to be Almighty God, 
and claims it as he did, can be self-deceived only 
when he is a mental weakling, unbalanced in mind, 
or absolutely insane. 

None of these things can be predicated of Jesus 
Christ. 



Christ 19 

On the contrary, he was the most intellectual 
man the world has ever known. 

Mark how he met the wisdom and the genius 
of the men who surrounded him. Again and again 
they came to him with crafty and perplexing ques- 
tions. With a word he solved their problems, 
flashed truth into their shame-smitten faces, and 
silenced them. In all the universe there is no soul 
meaner, more contemptible, more cowardly, and 
utterly lost to every sense of decent manhood than 
the man who, for the sake of entangling a good 
man in his speech, asks him questions in public, 
before an audience ready at every turn to mis- 
quote and misinterpret his slightest utterance ; and 
that is what they did. They came to him, not with 
the desire to know the truth, but to confound him, 
cast him down and destroy his prestige with the 
people. To every question he gave an answer 
having in it spiritual truth, but bearing the un- 
mistakable stamp of rare wisdom and intellectual 
superiority. 

His words, the simple speech he used in the 
midst of them, or alone with his disciples, have 
been the impulse of the mightiest intellectual 
activity the world has ever known. Out of his 
words have grown systems of theology that may 
well call for all there is of brain power and capac- 
ity in those who study them. Here are to be found 
the keenest speculations and the farthest outreach 
of metaphysical suggestion and the most detailed 
analysis of which the human mind is capable. 



20 Christ, Christiattity akd the Bible 

Book after book, treatise after treatise, discourse 
after discourse, have been produced out of the 
simplest and most detached things he said. No 
man can read his speeches and not find the mind 
stimulated, shocked, quickened and impelled for- 
ward even upon the most daring lines of thought. 

It would be easy to call the roll of the princes 
and kings in the realm of intellect, men whose 
thoughts burn and flame like great quenchless 
lights; men whose minds are the storehouses of 
knowledge, and whose utterances by word and pen 
have moved the quickest and most forceful lives 
in the world. It would be easy to call the long roll 
of these names shining like stars and constella- 
tions in the firmament of thought — ^princes and 
kings of intellect who acknowledge that Jesus 
Christ is not only superior to them morally and 
spiritually, but intellectually. 

What man is there to-day with any degree of 
mental self-respect who would dare to stand up 
and assert himself the equal of Jesus Christ in- 
tellectually? 

Without necessity of demonstration, it ought to 
be a truth beyond question that Jesus Christ was 
the most intellectual man the world has ever 
known. 

Such a man as that could not be self-deceived. 

If he were not Almighty God he knew it. 

He knew it as well as these good Unitarians, 
and these wondrously advanced scholars who can- 
not get beyond the glamour of his humanity. 



Cheist 21 

He knew it at first hands. 

If he were not Almighty God — if he were only 
a man — he knew it, knew it through and through, 
in every fibre of his being. 

There is no possibility then whatever for him 
to have been deceived. 

If he were not deceived, if he knew he was not 
God, then— 

HE WAS NOT A GOOD MAN. 

This is his own argument: 

A young man came to him and said, ^^Good 
Master, what good thing shall I do, that I may 
inherit eternal life? and he said unto him. Why 
callest thou me good? there is none good hut one, 
that is God/^ 

The argument is simple enough. 

"You call me good. God alone is good. If I am not 
God, I am not good." 

Not good! 

Nay ! If he were not God, he was the most wan- 
tonly wicked man of whom I ever heard. 

If he were not God, not only does disaster fall 
upon himself in the total destruction of his char- 
acter, and in the consequent and final driving of 
him from the suffrage and consideration of men, 
but the disaster falls upon all who have put their 
faith in him. 

If Jesus Christ were not God, then he never 
forgave the sins of a single soul, and all those 
throughout the two thousand years who have gone 
into eternity trusting in his name have gone into 



22 Christ, CnRiSTiAisriTY and the Bible 

that eternity unforgiven and nnshrived of 
God. 

If Jesus Christ were not God, then he has not 
forgiven the sin of a single human being alive 
to-day. 

You had sinned ! There were memories of the 
sins you had committed. They allowed you no 
rest. They gave you anguish of mind. Others 
could not forgive you. You could not forgive your- 
self. The consciousness that you stood naked be- 
fore the all-seeing eye of a holy God ; that he knew 
the circumstances and every detail thereof, down 
to the very intents and purposes lying behind your 
deeds, and even your thoughts; that he looked 
into and saw all that was in your heart; in the 
consciousness growing clearer and stronger and 
more terrible each day that you had no excuse, 
no place that you could hold for a moment; that 
if he summoned you to his presence, you would 
stand in the white light of his unmixed holiness, 
and the inexorable and unrelenting wrath of his 
essential antagonism and just hatred against sin ; 
all this consciousness taking voice in you and 
through you, cried out in your soul, ^^I am guilty 
and undone.'^ And this filled you with a horror 
of great darkness and the utter blackness of a 
hopeless despair. Then you heard the voice of 
Jesus Christ saying, '^Come unto me.'^ '^Him 
that Cometh unto me I will in no wise cast out.'' 
You came. You fell at his feet. You owned 
his death as your atoning sacrifice. You claimed 



Chbist 23 

him as your substitute. You claimed forgiveness 
through his blood. He said to you, as he said to 
the paralytic, ^^Thy sins are forgiven thee.^' You 
rose and went away as when one is released from 
a galling chain ; as when a burden that was crush- 
ing to earth has been lifted from the sore, bleed- 
ing shoulder; as when one who has been tossed 
on a midnight sea enters the haven while the dawn 
is breaking, casts anchor and touches shore. For 
years you have had peace. The memory of your 
sins are there (for though God when he forgives 
forgets them, you cannot). Like David, perhaps, 
you cry, *^My sin is ever before me!'' The sin 
marks are there as the nail holes in the wall, but 
you have been able to look at them and have peace 
because you have said to yourself, ^^I am not an 
unwhipped of justice, my sins have been pun- 
ished in my substitute; they have been fully an- 
swered for in his blood. He has forgiven me and 
justified me and made me clean. In him I stand 
clothed in the very ' righteousness of God. ' I hate 
my sin and despise it for what it is in itself, for 
what it made him, my redeemer, to endure, but I 
have peace because he has fully satisfied in my 
behalf. I have actually satisfied in him and am 
delivered before God's court of holiness both from 
the guilt and the demerit of sin. I have, in short, 
gone through the judgment with Christ on the 
cross. He has pronounced forgiveness — absolu- 
tion — ^upon me, and he has done so by virtue of his 
power and authority as the living one in whom 



24 Cheist, Cheistian^ity akd the Bible 

dwelleth all the fulness of the godhead bodily — 
as my saviour and my God he has forgiven me 
and I ana at peace." 

All this you have said within yourself and 
testified. 

But I ask you now to face the terrible fact — ^if 
Jesus Christ were not God— this terrible fact — 
that you have been deceived. 

You have had a false peace. 

You have been living in a fooPs paradise. 

You are before God an unpardoned and as yet 
unpunished criminal awaiting your doom. 

All this is absolutely your state — 

IF— 

If Jesus Christ were not Almighty God. 

If Jesus Christ were not Almighty God, he had 
no authority nor power to forgive your sins. NO ! 
And if Jesus Christ were not God I know not 
where to bid you turn. You must carry the load 
of your sins all your days ; and when you die, go 
into eternity and face a holy God who tells you 
by every law and fact of nature that he never for- 
gives in a single case till he has first punished the 
sin and with it the sinner. 

If Jesus Christ were not God, his death was not 
an atonement. 

And this surely should be plain enough. 

Only God can atone to God. 

Only an infinite being can satisfy an infinite being. 

If Jesus Christ were not God he could not make 
an atonement. 



Cheist 25 

If he did not make an atonement, then the world 
has never been reconciled to God nor brought up 
on mercy ground. Instead of being lifted up to 
the plane of grace and mercy, the world is still 
under the condemnation and judgment of God, no 
longer under a suspended sentence, but sheer and 
defenceless, with nothing to hinder the crash of 
doom at any moment. 

There is no hope. There is no daysman. There 
is no one to offer unto God what he demands, and 
unto man what he needs. There is no mediator 
between a holy God and a sinful man. 

If Jesus Christ were not God, then he did not 
rise from the dead. He did not bring life and 
immortality to light, and, as for me, the preacher, 
I have no light to hold out to you in the all- 
embracing gloom and night of death. 

There is no hope. 

If a man shall tell me there is no hereafter, that 
death ends all, I shall take up the law of induction 
and argue him to a standstill along the line of 
unfathomable mysteries and inexplicable psycho- 
logical phenomena in the constitution of man, and 
the inexplicable absence of the phenomena in the 
state of death, inexplicable upon any known ma- 
terialistic ground, and I shall laugh at his inability 
to maintain his thesis beyond the poor shred of a 
hypothesis. If a man shall tell me as the result of 
pure reasoning that he concludes for the endless 
existence of the soul after death, and shall do this 
even upon the plane of induction, I shall turn and 



26 Chbist, Cheistianity and the Bible 

tell him tliat all his argument is based upon in- 
ference and not fact, finding its largest emphasis 
in the region of the unknowable and gues sable — in 
the things he cannot explain, where certain con- 
clusions can neither be successfully affirmed, nor 
successfully denied, and where, by consequence, he 
may console himself, if he wish, with his side of 
the guess ; and I shall feel a keen sense of sorrow 
at his inability to hold his premise in the final 
region of the sure. 

And what does all this mean? 

Is it playing fast and loose with the mind? Am 
I turning in upon myself and playing the mere 
harlequin in the arena of mental gymnastics ? 

No ! there is sane meaning to this double method 
— it is this: as much may be said along one line 
of reasoning as the other. Each is a non-sequitur 
to the other. Each negatives the other and leaves 
us with reason's torch inverted — the light out, the 
darkness deeper than ever; and standing on the 
threshold of the grave we are forced to cry out in 
the sharp agony of a continual self- smiting per- 
plexity : 

^^To be or not to be — that is the question/^ 

Question it is — always a question — always com- 
ing back from the side of every dead body — 
always coming back from the clod-filled grave — 
coming down from age to age, coming back a ques- 
tion no man, not the wisest mere man who ever 
lived, could answer, or any living wise man can 
answer to-day. 



Chbist 27 

If Jesus Christ were not God it cannot be an- 
swered ; for if Jesus Christ were not God, he did 
not rise from the dead and by divine power carry 
himself out of the region of death forever. 

If Jesus Christ were not God, you may go and 
sit by the tomb of your dead and weep bitter (be- 
cause hopeless) tears. 

If Jesus Christ were not God, then he was not a 
redeemer and saviour. All the beautiful things 
that have been taught about him as such are 
false. All the hopes of heaven, the beauty of the 
celestial city, the tree of life, the river of crystal, 
the company of the saints, the arch-angelic song, 
the meeting and the knowing of those who long 
ago have left us — none of these things are so. 

If he were not God, then it is not true that he 
sits upon the throne, high and lifted up, listening 
to the plaints of the weakest heart that shall trust 
him, and hearing the sound of every falling tear. 

If Jesus Christ be not God, then the whole sys- 
tem of Christianity built upon his person and 
work falls to the ground, is broken into fragments, 
and like wind-swept dust can never be gathered. 

If Jesus Christ be not God, the New Testament 
record of him is untrue. The New Testament 
impeached in its prime particular becomes a 
worthless book — a book full of exhortations to 
holiness and truth, in the name of him who is 
proven to be (if he ever lived at all) a blasphemer, 
a deceiver of men and the concrete of human 
wickedness. If the New Testament is not true, 



28 Cheist, Cheistianity and the Bible 

neither is the Old ; for the Old Testament finds its 
meaning and value only in the Christ of the New 
Testament. Take Jesus Christ out of the Old 
Testament (which you must do if you set aside the 
New; for he alone fulfils the types, the symbols 
and the prophecies of the Old Testament ; he alone 
makes its testimony and history intelligible; he 
alone gives unity, harmony and authoritative 
meaning to its exhortations) — take Christ out of 
the Old Testament and you take away its one and 
only key. 

And mark you — when Christ goes out of the 
Bible as God — God goes out of the Bible. The 
deity which has preserved it, the power which has 
made ^ it living and unchangeable in the midst of 
change and death, will have been dethroned. 

Without Christ as God you are without any 
sane and satisfying knowledge of God. 

Where will you turn to find God and know him 
to your comfort? You might as well look into 
the bottomless pit as into your own heart. 

No more satisfactory will it be to look into the 
heart of others. We are all built on the same 
plan. 

The difference is only in degree or extension. 

The basilar fact is, God cannot be found in any 
natural man. 

You cannot find or know him to your heart's 
content in nature. 

What kind of a God does nature reveal to you? 

I will answer for you — a God who puts you in 



Chbist 29 

this world and does not tell yon whence yon come, 
whether from the all mnd or the Almighty, from 
an angel or a devil, from jelly or genins, from the 
heights of heaven or the depths of hell. A God 
who pnts yon here and fills yon with qnestions he 
alone can answer and — refuses so to do, A God 
who calls yon into the world and gives yon eyes 
to see everything bnt yonrself . A God who hides 
yon from yourself, so that you do not know 
whether you are a function or a soul ; whether you 
are matter or spirit; whether you are a person- 
ality or a cellular part of a general whole — called 
man. A God who gave you mind with seemingly 
infinite possibilities in thought, and gave you a 
body that is finite and temporary in construction. 
A God who gives you an intellect which grasps 
after eternity, and is always saying on the sum- 
mit of any endeavor achieved, ^'What next?" and 
yet is limited to a few inconsequent years. A God 
who sets you face to face with the imminency of 
death, and never allows you to know at what 
moment you must go, and gives you no hint of the 
beyond — or whether there is a beyond. 

In France they do not tell the man who is to be 
guillotined till a few moments before the fatal 
hour. He is sleeping on his couch. He is dream- 
ing of pleasant fields, of running streams, of boy- 
hood's days, of to-morrows that shall be better — 
a heavy hand is laid on his shoulder — he starts 
up in bed — the gray light of early morning is 
filtering in through the barred window of his cell 



30 Cheist, Chbistianity and the Bible 

— stern-faced men are standing before him — they 
say, ^^Your hour is come; follow ns.'^ 

It is terrific. 

But this is the case of every human being. 

No one can tell when the summons may come — 
or where. 

A man was sitting in his room at close of day. 
It had been (so he said) the best day of his life. 
He had said to his wife that he never loved her 
more than he did then (and they had been married 
many years), never did he feel more content that 
they had chosen to walk together through life than 
then. He was full of plans for himself and for 
her (saying with great earnestness that their last 
days should be their best days). She answered 
back that she was glad with a great gladness that 
it was so. She turned away for a moment to 
glance in another direction, still speaking to him. 
When she looked back he was gone — gone while 
the love words and the hope words were still on 
his lips — the finger of death had touched his heart 
— a voice had whispered in his ear, ^^Come." 
There was only a lifeless bit of clay where a mo- 
ment before had been a body pulsing with life, 
with love, with hope. 

It is terrific — doomed — and not knowing how 
soon the bolt will strike. What sort of a God is 
this who laces your body with a network of laws, 
the breaking of the slightest of which — all un- 
known to you — may send you forth upon a path 
of diseased and tortured existence — in which the 



Christ SI 

body from whence you cannot escape shall be to 
you as a chamber of horrors — a place of the 
thumbscrew, the rack and the fagot. What kind 
of a God is that who allows the aged to linger out 
in a miserable prolongation of wretched days, a 
burden to themselves, a burden to others, and 
takes away the widow's only son — ^her only sup- 
port? Who is the God who creates one man with 
all the equipment for life, and another man with 
all the lack of it? What kind of a God is this who 
looks down out of the heaven of day and the 
heavens of night, and sees all the sorrow, the an- 
guish, the pain, the unspeakable tragedies, and 
sends no wing of angel to cleave the pitiless sky, 
no voice out of the silence to console, no hand to 
help? 

What man is there of you, if he had the power, 
would not banish sickness, sorrow,pain and death? 

What man is there of you who, if he could, 
would not make every human being well and 
happy? 

What then? What is the conclusion of the mat- 
ter concerning you? Simple enough — ^you have 
the heart to do it^ hut not the power. 

What is the conclusion concerning this God of 
nature? He has the poiver — hut does not manifest 
the heart. 

What will you say of this God of nature in such 
a scheme? 

What can you say but that your heart is better 
than the heart of the God which nature reveals? 



32 Cheist, Christianity a^d the Bible 

Can you hear, understand and love a God like 
that? 

Can you climb through nature up to nature's 
God and say, ^^I have found him, I know him"? 

You can climb up, but where will you find him? 

You will find him wrapped in the black thunder- 
cloud or girded with the robe of the lightnings. 
You will find him the God who splits the earth in 
twain with the earthquake's riving blow, loosens 
the bands of the sea, sends tidal waves in surges 
of destruction, pours out the lava streams from 
the volcano's cone, as kings pour wine from an 
earthen cup, spilling the wine and breaking the 
cup ; the God who turns an earthly paradise (like 
Messina) into a fire-smitten desert, and a city of 
the living into a cemetery of the unburied dead. 

When your heart aches, will such a God care 
for you? "Will his thunders console you? When 
your soul is dark, will his lightnings illumine it? 
When you yearn for love, will his inexorable law 
supply it? 

Ah, sirs, without Christ you are without a God 
whom you can love, whom you can trust, to whom 
you can go, and in whose strength you can lie 
down and — at last — ^be folded in peace. 

If Jesus Christ is not God, if the only God to 
whom you can go is the God of nature, then you 
might as well fall down in the sand at the base 
of the far Egyptian sphynx, open your eyes for 
a moment to the blue sky that spreads away to 
the horizon before its staring face, its cold, chis- 



Cheist 33 

elled, inscrutable smile, and the next moment shut 
your eyes against the pelting dust the idle winds 
blow thither. 

Ah! Nature is a sand-dune — and the God of 
nature is a Sphynx. 

Do you care to kneel and worship there? 

If Jesus Christ be not God the disaster is not 
alone to him, but to you — to me. 

If he were not God, then we are in a world 
where the very day is no better or brighter than 
a starless midnight. 

If Jesus Christ were a good man, a supremely good 
man and a supremely intellectual man, then he was 
and is (as he claimed) Almighty God. 

The New Testament says he was a supremely 
good, and a supremely intellectual man. 

For two thousand years the most brilliant men 
in the world have corroborated this record by 
freely testifying that Jesus Christ was a su- 
premely good and a supremely intellectual man; 
all this being so, I change the conditional form of 
the proposition to the indicative and declarative 
and now say: 

Since Jesus Christ was a supremely good and a 
supremely intellectual man, he was, therefore (as he 
claimed). Almighty God. 

He could not be a supremely good and a su- 
premely intellectual man and claim to be God 
unless he were God. 

Since he claimed to be God, therefore, he was 
God. 



34 Christ, Christiakity and the Bible 

Yes ; he was God. 

The evidences are manifold. 

He was sinless. 

He said: 

^^ Which of you convinceth me of sin?'' 

For two thousand years he has been in the con- 
centrated light of a hostile world's merciless in- 
vestigation. The light has been turned on the 
land in which he lived. Every rod of ground over 
which he travelled has been dug up, or surveyed, 
or trodden. His words have been weighed, bal- 
anced to a nicety against any probability of error, 
mistake, imagination, fancy or misquotation. His 
words have been split open as men break open 
rocks. All the contents of his words have been 
put in the crucible of criticism. Every thought 
has been insistently and unsentimentally assayed 
for, even, the suspicion or the slightest hint of an 
alloy. His teachings have been chemically dis- 
solved and turned into their component parts. 
The saline base of truth has been sought for at 
any risk to the compounded speech he made. 

And after all! not one self-respecting, authori- 
tative lip has uttered a charge against him. 

In the hush of a world that cannot even mur- 
mur, he steps forward and once more rings down 
his challenge: 

^^ Which of you convinceth me of sin?" 

He stands out among his fellows as a white 
shaft under a starless midnight. He rises above 
the passions of men as an unshaken rock in the 



Christ 35 

midst of a wild, lashed sea. He is to man's best 
character as harmony is to discord, as a smile is 
to a frown, as love is to hate, as blessing is to 
cursing, as a garden of lilies to a desert of sand, 
as heaven is to earth, as holiness is to sin and as 
life to death. 

If he were sinless, he was absolutely holy; he 
was so holy that his very presence brought out the 
sin in others. Sinful men and women fell at his 
feet and confessed their sins. At sight of him 
demons tore their way out of the bodies they pos- 
sessed and fled as clouds of darkness before the 
sun, crying as they fled, ^^Thou art the holy one 
of God — hast thou come to torment us before the 
time?'' Tormented as they were even then, as sin 
always is when confronted by holiness ; as vice is 
before virtue ; as a lie is before the truth. 

He was sinless. 

He was holy. 

His sinlessness and holiness cannot be ac- 
counted for on natural grounds. 

All his natural ancestry were sinful. 

His sinlessness cannot be accounted for unless 
he were God; for, sinlessness and holiness come 
alone from God and, as essential qualities, take 
their rise alone in God. 

His power over nature proved him God. 

His look changed water into wine, his word gave 
sight to the blind, healing to the deaf, speech to 
the dumb. At his word the lame man leaped as a 
hart, the leper was cleansed. He said, '^ Peace, 



36 Chbist^ Cheistianity ajstd the Bible 

be still/' and the wild tempest of the sea was 
hushedj and there was a great calm, a calm like 
unto the stillness of the nnruflfled rest of God. 

For two thousand years his regenerative power in a 
world of sin has been the proof that he was God. 

For two thousand years, in every age, in every 
clime, among all classes of men, from the refined 
infidel to the vilest sinner, from the cold atheist 
to the brutal idolater, men have been changed — 
transformed. Men who have been the bond slaves 
of passion, whose daily lives have been the output 
of iniquity, whose deeds have been for destruc- 
tion, whose words have been poison, and whose 
inmost thoughts have been as the vapors of 
miasma — these all — have been transformed into 
fountains of purity, into angels of mercy, or as 
illuminated missals have been written full of the 
name and the glory of God ; men whose every fibre 
was as the coarse and tangled threads of a brutal 
unrefinement have become men whose every line 
of character was as the woven gold of Ophir — 
and the speech that once smote with discord the 
ears that heard it has become as the sound of 
singing across silent waters and under listening 
stars. And you ask these transfigured human 
beings, as you find them travelling along the high- 
way of twenty noteful centuries, what it was that 
so changed them, put such new force and impetus 
in them, making them to be as men new created, 
and they will tell you that Jesus Christ came along 
that way, they saw in his face the stain of blood, 



Christ 37 

the marks of nails were in his hands and feet, he 
had the appearance of one who had been cruelly 
slain. He stopped, looked at them and said: 
^^Come nnto me." They obeyed, they fell at his 
feet. He touched them, a strange, keen sense 
thrilled through them. He said to them, ^^ Arise." 
They arose and found themselves new men — men 
twice begotten. 

Ask the drunkard who tried to be sober, broke 
every pledge and drank in his cup the very life 
blood of those he loved and who loved him — ^how 
at last he found strength to say a final ^^no," turn 
from the accursed thing, and enter a world all new 
in which to live, a freeman and no more a slave — 
he will tell you, ^^ Jesus Christ did it all." 

Ask any of the bond slaves of passion, men 
who have been gripped by every form of human 
desire, and whiplashed, and stung, and tortured 
by their gratification, and driven to fresh and 
maddening excess by the never satisfied and 
always burning lust within (ever crying like the 
horseleach's daughter, ^^Give, give"); ask them 
how it is that to-day they are freemen and walk 
as kings, and they will tell you that Jesus Christ 
laid hold of them, and by the might of his power, 
the tenderness of his love, and the wealth of his 
grace, made them free. 

And this has been going on for two thousand 
years. 

The story has recently been told of a great 
thinker lecturing one day before a large audience 



38 Cheist^ Christianity and the Bible 

of medical students — some eighteen hundred men 
who pressed in to hear him. He took from his 
desk a letter, and holding it up before him, said 
something to this effect: 

' ' Gentlemen ! I have here a letter from one of 
your number, in which he tells the story of his life 
— a record of shame, of sinful indulgence, that 
makes me shudder even to look at the letter. At 
the close of this fearful confession he asks, ^Can 
your God save such an one as I am?' '^ 

Stopping for a moment and surveying his audi- 
ence, the speaker said: ^'When I came to the city 
this afternoon (it was the city of Edinburgh) 
there was a beautiful, fleecy cloud spreading itself 
like a thing of glory in the upper sky, and I said, 
^0 cloud, where do you come fromT and the cloud 
answered me and said, ^I come from the slums 
and the low, vile places of the city. The sun of 
heaven reached down and lifted me up and trans- 
figured me with his shining. ' ' ' 

Looking about upon the now deeply impressed 
throng, the speaker, after a solemn pause, said : 

^ ' I do not know whether this young man is here 
or not, but if he is, I can say to him that my 
Saviour and my Master, Jesus Christ, he who is 
our great God and Saviour, he can reach down 
from the highest heaven to the lowest depths into 
which a human soul can sink, and can lift you, 
and lift you up and up, till he shines in you and 
through you, and transfigures you with the light 
of his love and glory.'' 



Cheist 39 

He can. 

He does. 

He is doing it now. 

And who is he who can do this but the living 
God alone? 

That Jesus Christ was God is the testimony of the 
men who lived in intimate communion with him and 
knew him best. 

John leaned on his breast at supper. John 
heard and knew the beating of the Master's heart, 
and John says : 

^^In the beginning was the Word, and the Word 
was with God, and the Word was God (God was 
the Word). The same was in the beginning with 
God. All things were made by him; and without 
him was not anything made that was made. . . . 
And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among 
us (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the 
only begotten of the Father) full of grace and 
truth.'' 

Again this same John writes : 

^^ Jesus Christ . . . THIS IS THE TRUE 
GOD." 

Writing to the Philippians, Paul declares, that 
Jesus Christ was in the ^^form of God," laid aside 
his glory as such, took upon him the ^^form" of 
sinful man, became obedient unto death, even the 
death of the cross, carried his humanity through 
hades and the grave, rose out from among the dead, 
and took that humanity to the throne of the high- 
est. There God the Father reclothed him with 



40 Cheist, Christian-ity and the Bible 

the unbegun and uncreated glory wMch he had 
laid aside, gave him a name which is above every 
name, even the name of Jesus, and has highly and 
eternally ordained that every knee in the wide 
extended universe shall bow, and every tongue 
confess, that he is Lord to the glory of God the 
Father. 

In his epistle to the Colossians, the Apostle 
Paul announces that this ^^same Jesus'^ is the 
^^ image of the invisible God; by him were all 
things created that are in heaven, and that are in 
earth, visible and invisible, whether they be 
thrones or dominions, or principalities or powers ; 
all things were created hy Mm, and for him/^ 

To the same Colossians he further writes : 

^^In him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead 
bodily/^ 

To the Hebrews he says: ^^He is the brightness 
of the Father's glory, and the express image of 
Ms person'^ (the word ^4mage'' is ja/?a/cr^/> and 
signifies an ^ ^ engraving, ' ' the very engraving of 
God in the flesh, the engraving of God in human- 
ity) and upholding all things by the word of his 
power. ^^ Upholding all things!'' this earth in its 
orbit about the sun ; the sun in its orbit about some 
other sun ; all suns and systems in their orbits of 
splendor, whirling onward in ever-widening dis- 
tances over highways of infinite spaces, through 
extensions that are measureless, and where time 
does not count. In that unmeasured expansion 
where the points of the compass are lost and **di- 



Cheist 41 

mension" is a meaningless term; in that incom- 
prehensible and indefinable vastness, filled with 
the might and the majesty of form, of weight, of 
motion and limitless power — all things — are hang- 
ing on his word and obeying his will. 

Not only does the New Testament proclaim him 
God — the Old Testament does likewise, and with 
unmistakable speech. 

The prophet Isaiah says: 

*^Unto us a child is born, unto us a son is 
given, and the government shall be upon his 
shoulder ; and his name shall be called Wonderful, 
Counsellor, the mighty God, the everlasting 
Father/' 

Micah, the prophet, glorifies the little town of 
Bethlehem, least as it is among the thousands of 
Judah, and foretells that he who shall be born 
there, and is to be ruler in Israel, is he ^^ whose 
goings forth have been from old, from everlast- 
ing/' He who has been the outgoing and the 
forth-putting of the invisible God; and who 
is, and who alone can be, the visibility of 
God. 

When we turn to the New Testament once more, 
we are given a vision of him, in Patmos, where he 
appears to that beloved John who had leaned so 
heavily on his heart in the days of the earthly 
pilgrimage. It is a vision of wonder, of glory, 
and divine splendor. He is seen as a man — as 
one who had become dead, who was now alive, who 
had conquered both death and the grave. His face 



42 Cheist, Christiakity and the Bible 

shone with the light of the noonday sun, his eye 
glances were as a flame of fire, and when he spoke, 
his voice was as the sound of many waters ; and 
this is what he said for himself : 

^^I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and 
the ending, saith the Lord, which is, and which 
was, and which is to come, the Almighty/^ 

This is the climax. 

He claimed to be Almighty God while on earth. 

He claims it from heaven. 

He says I am God — ^he says that because he de- 
clares himself as embracing the whole extent of 
being. 

Listen : 

^^I am he that is^^ — that is to say, the self -exist- 
ing one ; for the statement is the cognate of that, 
^^I am that I am,'^ which is the pre-eminent ap- 
pelative of deity. 

^'I am he which was^' — and this extends being 
into the past; that past he himself defines. He 
does not say I am in the beginning, but I am the 
beginning — beginning itself — the origin of things 
and, therefore, himself unbegun, eternal, from 
everlasting. It is the echo of that far-flung phrase 
of old: Even from everlasting to everlasting thou 
art God/^ 

'^1 am he which is to come'' — this includes eter- 
nity future — the unendingness which stretches 
without a horizon beyond the present. 

Here is fulness — and the fulness of the Godhead 
bodily. 



Cheist 43 

In saying these words upon Patmos, then, our 
Lord Jesus Christ says : 

^^I am God — I am Almighty God/' 

Nor is this a mere conclusion from the premise 
here! 

He says it directly, plainly and squarely him- 
self. 

He says not only that he is, and was, and is to 
come — but he says — 

"I AM THE ALMIGHTY." 

And Paul, the special apostle of the Church, 
unites with Thomas (the believing, but material 
evidence demanding representative of the elect 
remnant in Israel) in proclaiming the deity of 
God's Christ. 

Thomas falls at his feet and cries : 

^^My Lord and My God/' 

Paul bows his head in adoration before him and 
writes : 

^'Our great God and Saviour — Jesus Christ/' 

Upon the august throne of the universe he is 
seated. 

He who lay a babe upon a woman's breast; who, 
although he was infinite, became an infant; who 
being in the form of God, did not hesitate to put 
off the divine glory and put on mortal humanity 
that (as an infinite person) he might, through the 
^^ prepared" body of his mortality, offer an in- 
finite sacrifice for men; who died under a male- 
factor's doom, but with his nailed hands, in the 
hour of his agony, saved a thief from hell — opening 



44 Christ, Christianity and the Bible 

to Mni the gates of Paradise ; lie who refused the 
deliverance of angels when they bent above his 
cross, that by his cross he might give to men the 
deliverance angels conld not give; he who was 
buried in a borrowed grave; who rose as an im- 
mortal man, ascended as the Second Adam — the 
New Head of Humanity — the Life Giver to a 
world, and took his seat on the Father's throne, 
as witness of redemption achieved and salvation 
secured — ^he sits there now, and having taken to 
himself the glory which he had with the Father 
before all worlds were, having clothed his im- 
mortal humanity with that ''form of God'' which 
ever was his, now sits the centre of a world ^s 
adoration and heaven's amaze, as the GOD MAN 
— the highest form of God and the ultimate form 
of man ; the proclamation that man in Christ is the 
archetype of God and God in Christ the archetype 
of man. 

As we thus gaze upon him in whom dwelleth 
all the fulness of the Godhead bodily ; as we medi- 
tate upon him, seek to reason about him, are 
touched by his love, held by his power, and filled 
with his life, we say with the inspired apostle: 
^^ Without controversy, great is the mystery of 
godliness : God was manifest in the flesh." 

''Our great God/' repeats Paul, and he adds, 
to balance the wonder of it, ^^and our Saviour 
Jesus Christ;" he who, in some glad day nearer 
than we think, is coming back to this old, sin- 
stained, grave-digged world — to be owned and 



Chbist 45 

saluted by all nations, peoples, kindred and 
tongues as — 

"THE GOD OF THE WHOLE EARTH." 

With all this glory and this wonder he is, as the 
angels said (who spoke of his ascension, session 
and Second Coming), ^^THIS SAME JESUS,'' 
full of tender mercy, and loving compassion; 
by virtue of his perfect sacrifice able to 
save unto the uttermost all who come unto God 
the Father by him ; saying from heaven as he once 
said on earth: ^^Him that cometh unto me, I will 
in no wise cast out" ; but saying at the same time, 
and with unfailing faithfulness: ^^No man cometh 
unto the Father hut by me^' ; saying it faithfully 
because, of a truth, only in the Son can the Father 
be found. 

Let me exhort all who may read these lines, if 
you have not already done so, to fall down at his 
pierced feet, and with deep contrition for all your 
transgressions and for your very nature of sin 
which helped to nail him to the accursed tree, say 
with voice of unfailing love and unfaltering faith : 

^'My Saviour and my God J' 

If you have already owned him as your Saviour, 
then, as Thomas of old, with the voice of deep 
devotion say: 

^^My Lord and my God/' 

To those of you (if there be such) who still deny 
his deity and persist in calling him good, he, him- 
self, is asking you from heaven as he asked it 
aforetime upon earth : 



46 Christ, Christianity and the Bible 



<( 



Why callest thou me good?^^ 

In asking you that he is putting upon you the 
responsibility of the terrible conclusion of your 
own premise: 

IF NOT GOD— NOT GOOD! 

Are you willing to face him in eternity with 
that inexorable alternative : 

"IF NOT GOD— NOT GOOD?" 




Cbri6tianiti2 

WHAT IS CHEISTIANITY? 

^HAT is Christianity? 
The question seems a belated one. 
It never was more pertinent than now. 
Its pertinency rests upon two facts. 

First : the modern drift in Christianity and its 
absolute failure. 

Second: the phenomenal triumph of primitive 
Christianity. 

The modern drift is antagonistic to doctrine 
and repudiates the miraculous. 

It sets aside the virgin birth, has no toleration 
for atonement by sacrificial death, and positively 
refuses to accept the bodily resurrection of our 
Lord Jesus Christ. 

It holds that God is the Father of all men. Each 
man is inheringly a son of God. He has in him 
all the elements of the divine lineage. Exercise 
and culture are alone needed to reveal these ele- 
ments and demonstrate this lineage. Salvation is 
not the redemption of a child of the Devil, but 
recovery of a child of God from the hands of the 
Devil. Salvation is the restoration of the indi- 
vidual to the consciousness of this relationship; 
but salvation is effectively individual only as it is 

47 



48 Chbist, Chbistianity and the Bible 

primarily social. The time has passed (so we are 
told) when the individual may be discussed and 
his social condition ignored. To seek out an indi- 
\ddual here and there and endeavor to redeem or 
recover him while the environment remains un- 
changed, is a waste of force : as foolish as it would 
be to spend millions on remedies for people sick 
with malaria in a pestilential and malarial dis- 
trict, and ignore the condition of the district. 
True wisdom would demand first of all that the 
district be purged, the environment made healthy, 
the cause of malaria destroyed. 

Human beings are neither sinning nor suffering 
because a possible first man away back some- 
where ate forbidden fruit at the insistent appeal 
of his too persistent wife. Men are sinning and 
suffering because social conditions are all wrong. 
These wrong conditions fill the multitude with dis- 
couragement and depression. They are unable to 
breathe an inspiring life force. They cannot 
obtain sufficient impulse to live above low levels. 
The laws, the customs, the inequalities of life, 
hedge them like brutes in a corral. This corralling 
and hedging of humanity en masse, while the few 
pull away from the crowd and create an environ- 
ment satisfactory to themselves at the expense of 
the crowd, is the raison d^etre for all evil con- 
ditions. Let us have right legislation. Let us 
make right laws. The moment the social condition 
enables a man to discover the divine things in 
Mm, he will live right by preference. We are no 



Chbistianity 49 

longer to spend eloquence, prayer and time on 
revivals, and now and then, here and there, 
get an individual to live fairly right in spite of 
hindering conditions. The sermon of the preacher 
should appeal to the law-maker rather than to the 
law-breaker; it should arouse men, not to the 
danger of a hell far off, but to a hell near at hand, 
the hell of unjust laws, of sanitary neglect, of 
oppression of man by man. 

Social redemption ! that is the watchword. 

Social salvation! that is the crying need. 

All this (we are told) is to be accomplished by 
appealing to the divine in man, to his hitherto 
ignored resources. This appeal can be made of 
avail only by setting up some human figure in 
which this divine life has been fully proved and 
clearly portrayed. In the nature of the case, for 
a modernist Christian, such a person is to be 
found alone in our Lord Jesus Christ. By such 
he is now hailed, and continually announced, as 
the advanced man, the quintessent demonstration 
of evolution as applied to humanity, the way- 
shower, the exemplar and true copy. He is in- 
carnate altruism. His whole life was self-denial. 
His daily interest was in social conditions. To 
him society was the objective, the individual an 
incident. His teachings, when fairly construed, 
involve the overthrow of the old, and the bringing 
in of a radically new society, in which the divine 
life in man may have an opportunity to unfold. 
His doctrines, when analyzed, are explosive; if 



50 Christ, CHRiSTiAisriTY and the Bible 

practically carried out would be revolutionary. 
He is, in short, tlie true socialist. If we follow 
him as such, if we work out his intent, we shall 
have individual salvation, but we shall have it as 
a consequent of social redemption. 

There may be shining worlds beyond this. 
There may be holy cities with golden streets. 
There may be robes of righteousness and trees of 
life. What we need to do, as Christians, is to take 
care of the world in which we now live, build first- 
class holy cities here, see that the streets are well 
paved, and the sewers in order, put fit clothing on 
the backs of the poor, fill the mouths of the hungry 
with actual bread, make the hours of labor min- 
imum, and the hours of personal culture maxi- 
mum, and thus weave a garment of civic, social 
and individual righteousness that shall stand the 
test of this world or any other. In other words, 
we are to live the life that now is — and let that 
which is to come take care of itself. 

This is the trend of the modern drift. 

It is an endeavor to bring the church down out 
of the clouds, place it on the level of human ex- 
perience, meet present human needs in practical 
ways, and establish a system of natural, rational 
and universal ethics. 

And yet — in spite of this widely heralded lib- 
eralism; in spite of the effort to accommodate 
itself to the rationalism, the unbelief and down- 
right infidelity of the hour; in spite of the deter- 
mination to cut loose from the primaries of the 



Cheistianity 51 

first century and ally itself with the fast-going 
advance of the twentieth, this movement in the 
name of Christianity has not succeeded in win- 
ning and holding the multitude either to a per- 
sonal and modified Christ, or to a reorganized and 
elastic church. 

The churches in which it flourishes ; the churches 
which have renounced faith in the supernatural 
and miraculous; the churches which have swung 
the doors wide open on the hinges of worldly wis- 
dom and easy tolerance ; the churches which have 
substituted natural generation for supernatural 
regeneration, evolution instead of revolution, the 
working out of human life, instead of the coming 
in of divine life; the churches which teach that 
man is to go up and take hold of God, instead of 
God coming down to take hold on man; the 
churches which are broad enough to allow men of 
all faiths, and men of no faith at all, to occupy 
their pulpits, are not overcrowded, nor have 
righteousness and holiness extraordinarily in- 
creased in their neighborhood. 

On the contrary, in face of every effort to con- 
ciliate the naturalism in man, men look upon these 
churches, and the Christianity they advocate, with 
suspicion. They see these churches have their 
goods still marked with the words, ^^super- 
natural, " ^ ^ miraculous. ' ' It is true, these churches 
may practically put such goods out of sight ; even 
then, men will not be attracted beyond the expres- 
sion of a condescending tolerance; and while ad- 



52 Christ, Christianity and the Bible 

mitting, as they will, that the church is earnestly 
endeavoring to get rid of its ancient incubus of 
theology, free its hands and take hold of the plow 
handle of progress, ready, if needs be, to drive a 
furrow deep enough to bury all memories of primi- 
tive faith, yet will they turn away from that kind 
of a church and that sort of Christianity, with the 
feeling that all this action on the part of the church 
is but another feeble effort at competitive moral- 
ity. They will turn from it and seek their own or- 
ganizations wherein no issue of the supernatural 
has ever been raised ; where the quasi personality 
and questionable existence of an unseen God are 
not at all discussed; and where man and his pres- 
ent life are the only subjects deemed worthy of 
consideration. 

If this drift as thus indicated shall continue 
another ten years, and enlist the support and open 
advocacy of leading and representative thinkers 
in the church ; if the theological seminaries shall 
continue to turn out on graduation day, with their 
all too mechanical regularity, men who do not be- 
lieve in the virgin birth, who find no real reason 
why our Lord Jesus Christ should have died at all, 
except the fatality of his genius that he was too 
far ahead of his time and was ^^ caught by the 
whirling wheel of the world's evil and torn in 
pieces"; if the repudiation of the Bible as the 
final and inerrant revelation of God for this age 
shall continue so short a space as a decade, by 
that time, at the present rate of development, we 



Christianity 53 

shall have not only a very modern Christianity, a 
Christianity without miracles, without even a hint 
of the supernatural, but a Christianity without 
spiritual power or moral authority, standing as a 
delinquent on the street corners, and amid the 
hurry and rush of more vital things, begging per- 
mission simply to exist. 

Over against this modern drift and its ampli- 
tude of failure stands the phenomenal success of 
original and primitive Christianity. 

And yet, the conditions which confronted this 
nascent faith were appalling. 

It was the era of materialism. Force was the 
prime minister, self-gratification the supreme 
legislator. Exaggerated superstition was bal- 
anced by decaying faith. It was a time of co- 
ordinately high mental activity, an intellectuality 
that cynically rejoiced at its own failure to solve 
the riddle of the universe, maliciously suggested 
new difficulties, raised barriers against its own 
research, and prostrating itself in the name of 
mere brutism, worshipped nature as the ready 
panderer to its worst passions, while owning it as 
a cruelly smiling and pitiless sphinx. 

The one hundred and twenty men and women 
who faced the Eoman world with the determination 
to impinge their faith upon it, seemed the most 
audaciously unwise of all forlorn and hopeless 
fanatics. They had neither wealth nor social 
standing. Their culture was at zero, their knowl- 
edge indifferent. Localism and tradition en- 



il 



54 ChEIST, CHBISTIAlSriTY AND THE BiBLE 

vironed them, and the story they had to tell was 
not only an affront to the course of nature, but a 
direct repudiation of old faiths and cherished re- 
ligions. Itself a religio illicita^ Christianity chal- 
lenged governmental law and invoked, logically, 
the keenest persecution. The mountains which 
surrounded Jerusalem were not so high, nor so 
difficult of ascent, as the prejudice far and near 
over which they needs must climb, even if they 
would gain but a tolerated hearing. 

Yet they went forth ! and so preached, that they 
not only saved and transfigured individuals, but 
so molded and transformed society, that in its 
every-day achievements, Christianity itself seemed 
like a miracle to astonished and silenced on- 
lookers. 

Startlingly enough this moulding of society, this 
overturning of old conditions — this bringing in of 
the radically new, so that their enemies said of 
them they had ^^ turned the world upside down'^; 
this repudiation of brutality and the exaltation of 
unselfishness; this building up of a condition in 
which a community now judged itself by the 
standards of chastity, righteousness and neigh- 
borly kindness; this renovation of whole centres 
of life till the erstwhile deserts wherein not a 
flower of gentleness had bloomed, now blossomed 
as gardens of delight, watered with never-ceasing 
streams of brotherly love — ^were produced, not by 
an appeal to society itself, not by denunciation of 
laws and customs, however bad, but by laying hold 



Cheistianity 55 

of a human soul, estimating it in value by the 
weight of a whole world, and changing the indi- 
vidual life. 

This was the triumph of original and primitive 
Christianity. 

In view of such a triumph and the unqualified 
failure of the modern drift which claims the name 
of Christianity, it should seem a perfectly legiti- 
mate and altogether pertinent question to ask, 

^^What is Christianity r' 

The answer is given by the apostle Paul in his 
second letter to Timothy, his son in the faith, the 
preacher of his own ordination. He says : 

"Our Saviour Jesus Christ . . . has abolished death 
and brought life and immortality to light through the 
Gospel." (2 Timothy i : 10.) 

According to this declaration, the Gospel is the 
good news that our Lord Jesus Christ came into 
the world to accomplish three things — abolish 
death, bring in a new life and reveal immortality. 
As the Gospel is the heart beat of Christianity, 
then the three things which proclaim its constitu- 
ent and objective characteristic are: 

The abolition of death. 

The gift of a new life. 

Immortality. 

First — ^The abolition of death. 

Death is a black fact. It is the shadow the sun 
never penetrates, the robber who steals the treas- 
ure more precious than gold, the guest who never 
waits to be invited;, the intruder who feels at home 



56 Cheist^ Chbistiaotty anit the Bible 

whether in palace or in cot, has no respect of 
persons, and lays his hand with eqnal familiarity 
on the king upon his throne, or the tramp by the 
wayside, saying ^^come" to the sick, ^ Harry not'' 
to the well, is sure of the old, and revels like a 
reaper in the harvest of the young. It breaks the 
plans and disorganizes the relations of life; and 
then, like a coarse comedian or a heartless satirist, 
compels those who survive to turn away from the 
memory of their dead, reorganize their lives and 
live on as though those who once lived with them 
and formed an intimate part of their daily experi- 
ence had never existed. 

Unless God himself shall intervene, death is the 
certain end of the longest life. 

Side by side with the certainty of death are two 
things which give it emphasis : the brevity of life 
and its uncertainty. 

How brief it is ! what are sixty or seventy years 
as measured by hopes and fears, by splendor of 
genius, by forecasts that outreach the ages, by 
thoughts that climb and climb with ease to the 
infinite, by energy of mind, which, rising superior 
to the combined hindrances of every day, is always 
peering beyond the last endeavor, and stretching 
itself towards unbroken continuance, cries, ^^What 
nextr' Extract from the allotted time of three 
score years and ten, the puling days of infancy, 
the immature years of youth, the hours of inde- 
cision as to the route to take, the right profession 
to follow; take the hours given to eating and 



Cheistianity 57 

drinking (that eating and drinking which in spite 
of the glamor we throw about it is simply repair- 
ing the mechanical waste and renewing the chem- 
ical energy that will enable us to go on a little 
while and a little way farther) ; take out the time 
spent in sleep — ^in practical nonentity — and the 
remainder is a pitiful handful of years, so few, 
that to number them seems like a mathematical 
mockery, like numerical trifling. 

And the uncertainty of life! What man is he 
who can assure himself of ten days? In that time 
he may die, be buried and be forgotten by the 
world that scarcely heard the tolling of his funeral 
bell, and had no time to stay and hear the falling 
of the grave clods upon the coffin lid. 

This emphasis of brevity and uncertainty has 
affected men more or less from the beginning. In 
the hour when Christianity was born it affected 
them well nigh unto delirium. So brief was the 
vision of life, so tumultuous its incidents, so con- 
scious were men of its uncertainty, that they 
played with it as gamblers throw dice. It be- 
came cheap, cheaper than the ground in which 
their bodies were so soon to be laid; and in de- 
rision of its cheapness they built great monuments 
to hold their scattered dust, monuments that 
should outlast by centuries their latest breath; 
with light laughter they rode past these chiselled 
tombs and scorned themselves as the builders of 
a longevity their own being could never know. 

This fact of death is impressing men now. 



58 Christ, Christianity and the Bible 

In proportion as life increases in knowledge; 
in proportion as men become masters of nature's 
forces; in proportion as they measure the uni- 
verse, make daily incursions therein, and bring 
back always some conquered thing, some new dis- 
covery as a tribute to the limitlessness of mind, 
in this proportion the unequal brevity and the dis- 
integrating uncertainty of life, lead men to ask 
with more and more insistence, whether, after all, 
it is worth while. Is it worth while to carry bur- 
dens which force us to look down into the dust 
of the highway, and not up and out to the wider 
landscape ? Is it worth while to put so much force 
of soul and spirit, brain and heart into things 
from which we may be summoned without a mo- 
ment's notice? Is it worth while to live, and then 
go to pieces through the effort at living, live on 
day after day like a machine out of gear (held 
together oftentimes only by the surgeon's skill), 
then break down completely, give a final sigh and 
be hurried away to add a lot of useless fragments 
to the already accumulated scrap heap of the still 
more useless graveyard? 

Into this emphasis of brevity and uncertainty, 
there enters another element which increasingly 
raises the question — ^^Is it worth while?" 

That added element is the silence of the grave. 

The grave is terribly silent. 

You can hear the gravel rattling out of the 
grave digger's shovel with a thud upon the coffin 
lid ; or, you can hear the crunching, jarring sound 



Cheistianity 59/ 

as the casket is slid into its place in the receiving 
vault, and you can hear the turn of the key and 
the snap of the bolt as the gate or door of the 
sepulchre is shut and locked. 

You may stand above the simple mound of the 
churchyard, in front of some monumental shaft, 
or before the sculptured urn; it may be the dust 
of a king, a scholar, or some nameless beggar 
which is heaped within — the silence will be un- 
broken — except by the sound of your own voice as 
you ask: 

''Where are they? What are they I AEE 
theyr^ 

Although the sun may be shining in full splen- 
dor over row after row of graves, no light will be 
I there in which to read the answer to your ques- 
! tions. 

Instead of light there will be thick darkness 
upon the graves, and gross darkness within. 

Men peer into this darkness. There is no vision 
— no speech — and they ask: ''Is it worth while 
to toil, to labor, to accumulate, to make great ad- 
vance in knowledge, to build higher every day the 
conning towers of science, and then leaving these 
high points of achievement, enter into that realm 
where no surveyor's chain has ever measured the 
extent, where no geographer has ever named a 
headland, and where the one supreme fact that 
meets us on the threshold is ignorance — a black, 
blinding, all-pervading ignorance as to the next 
moment after death; so that at the end of our 



60 Cheist, C/HEIstianity and i:he Bible 

reasoning, deduction and amplification, the one 
thing remaining to the scholar and the fool alike 
concerning death is a guess, a guess in which the 
wish of existence is father to the thought, but 
where the hope of to-morrow is, easily, the despair 
of to-day. 

With life so brief, so uncertain, and ending in 
the starless night of silence, men in one form of 
utterance or another are, in substance, calling to 
each other and saying, ^^Let us eat and drink — 
for to-morrow we die/^ 

Thus the contemplation of death and its im- 
partial and unprejudiced analysis leads to a belief 
in materialism and a greater or less surrender to 
mere sensualism; for, if men cannot go up they 
will go down ; if they cannot live in the spirit, they 
will grovel in the flesh. 

"What then shall we say concerning this fact 
of death? 

Shall we say it is a part of nature's economy — 
as legitimate as birth? Because we know nothing 
of any pre-existent state and are content to go 
forward in life, shall we now balk and hesitate to 
discharge our functions or meet our opportuni- 
ties, because we have no evidence of an after ex- 
istence ? 

Is death really natural? 

Absolutely it is not! 

The whole being of man revolts against it, 
morally, intellectually and organically. Every 
law of nature in man is against it. Pain and suf- 



Christianity 61 

fering are its protest. To say that it is as natural 
as birth is to be giiilty of pure bathos; even the 
worm crushed and quivering denies the sentiment. 
Schwann, the author of the cellular theory, says : 
^'I really do not know why we die." 

There is no reason in nature. 

The process which renews the body every seven 
years — so far as any law in nature shows — might 
go on indefinitely ; there is no reason in itself why 
it should cease, and the soul within is never con- 
scious of the added years. No one ever thinks 
of asking, ^^Why do we live?" Always, and in- 
voluntarily, we ask, ^^Why do we die?" Always 
we are seeking to continue life, inventing some- 
thing to make it immune from death. To live, 
therefore, is natural. Not to live is unnatural. 
Being unnatural, it is an interference with nature. 
An interference with nature is superior to nature. 
That which is an interference of and superior 
to nature is a direct imposition upon nature. 
An imposition upon nature could not be possible 
without the permission and will of God. If God 
allows and wills it, then the imposition is for 
cause ; being such, it is a judicial act, a judgment, 
and becomes, necessarily, a penalty. Penalty 
w stands for violated law. Violated law is trans- 
gression. Transgression is sin. Sin, in final anal- 
ysis, is lawlessness, and lawlessness is treason 
against Jehovah. Death is, therefore, an impo- 
sition of God, and is his penalty against the 
treason of sin. 



62 Cheist, Cheistianity and the Bible 

This, then, is the explanation of death — it is the 
penalty of sin. 

This is the definition which Christianity gives — 
as it is written: ^'By one man sin entered into the 
world, and death by sin ; and so death passed upon 
all men/' (Eomans 5: 12.) 

Again it is written : 

^^It is appointed nnto men once to die.'' (He- 
brews 9:27.) 

In thus determining and defining death, Chris- 
tianity reveals both its essence and its mission; 
for, through its Gospel, Christianity brings the 
good news that the issue of sin and death as be- 
tween God and man has been settled by our Lord 
Jesus Christ ; that he has settled it perfectly and 
forever according to the terms of divine righteous- 
ness by dying as a sacrifice for sin and as a sub- 
stitute for sinners. 

In order to be a substitute it was necessary 
that our Lord Jesus Christ should be a sinless 
man ; otherwise, his death would be only his own 
execution under the penalty of sin, and could not 
avail either for himself or others. None of 
Adam's race is sinless; a sinless person must be 
of another race. To be of another race and be 
human would require a new creation and would be 
a new and distinct humanity. 

Our Lord Jesus Christ was sinless. He was, 
therefore, of a new and distinct humanity. In in- 
carnation, God did not take the humanity of Adam 
into union with himself, the humanity of our Lord 



Chbisttaitity 63 

Jesus Christ was the repudiation of the humanity 
of Adam. By that incarnation God was saying: 
*^I have tried the old humanity. I find nothing in 
it that responds to my claims. At its best it is 
sinful, only sinful and fit for judgment — the end 
of all flesh is come before me — and that end is 
death. '^ 

The humanity of Christ is, therefore, not an 
evolution, but a new creation; it is not an invi- 
tation to the natural man, but a condemnation of 
him. It does not say to him, '^Follow me, imitate 
me and you will be like me"; it says: ^'I am from 
above, ye are from below. I am from heaven and 
God— ye are from the earth. My humanity is as 
distinct from yours as the heavens are from the 
earth." 

Such a man is not an example, a copy to be set 
before men. 

And never, not once, do the apostles so set him 
before the natural man. Always they set him be- 
fore the natural man as the man who came into the 
world — not to live as an example — but to die as a 
sacrifice for men ; as one who was fit to die because 
he was free from the stain and penalty of sin. 

But in order that the death of Christ should be 
of infinite value, he must himself be an infinite 
person. The value of a deed depends upon the 
person who does it. The quality resides not alone 
in the act, but in the actor. The value of the death 
of our Lord Jesus Christ is not to be measured 
by its duration, but by himself — by what he was 



il 



64 Christ, Christianity and the Bible 

in himself ; it does not depend upon the length of 
time in which as a substitute he suffered the pun- 
ishment of those whose place he was taking, but 
the essential quality of his person. Did our Lord 
suffer but a moment of time on the cross, the value 
of his suffering as a satisfaction to the law, gov- 
ernment and being of God would be infinite. 

An infinite person is God. 

Always as such do the apostles present our Lord 
Jesus Christ. Their testimony to his deity rings 
out like the blast of far-sounding trumpets. In 
terms that are precise, and so strong and clear 
that he who runs may read, they proclaim that 
he is God of God, very God of very God. 

As God the Son, in co-operation with God the 
Father and God the Spirit, he who is presented 
to us as the Lord Jesus Christ, took a cell from 
the substance of the virgin Mary, made it a mould 
and with generating power wrought from it a real 
humanity — a new and distinct humanity— and 
united it to his eternal personality; so that he 
stands forth as the eternal God endowed with a 
human nature — ^with two natures, human and di- 
vine, in one body and one person forever — the 
infinite God-man. 

Never do the apostles present him as a mere 
man. They present his humanity as the back- 
ground for his deity. His humanity in its most 
literal revelation is always declared by them to 
be the revelation and the manifestation of God. 
Never do the apostles attempt to reason about the 



Chbistianity 65 

incarnation, with superb affirmation and sublime 
dignity they declare, ^^ Without controversy, great 
is the mystery of godliness ; God was manifest in 
the flesh." 

And it is this God whom Christianity presents 
as coming down from the heaven of glory, and 
clothing himself with a new, a distinct, but a mor- 
tal humanity in which to die as an infinite substi- 
tute for guilty men, that through death, he might 
abolish death for men. 

Having died as a sacrificial substitute, death 
considered as a penalty, and the guilt and demerit 
of sin which induced the penalty, have been set 
aside for all for whom his substitution avails. 

Nor does Christianity leave us long in doubt as 
to those for whom the substitution obtains. In full 
and precise statement of doctrine it tells us that 
this substitution is on the behalf of, and for, all 
who individually claim our Lord Jesus Christ on 
the cross as a personal sacrifice for sin, and who 
by faith offer him to God as the sacrifice and sin 
offering which God himself has provided. 

Thus it follows, that for every believer — death 
as a penalty has been abolished, brought to nought. 

This is the first great and joyous proclamation 
of Christianity, Death has been abolished as a 
penalty for every believer. 

It has been abolished de jure, not yet de facto. 

The Christian still dies, but his death is no 
longer penal, it is providential and provisional. 

In the hour of death the Christian is not seized 



66 Cheist^ Christianity and the Bible 

as a culprit and hurried away to execution. On 
the contrary, when the hour of death sounds for 
him, a voice inspired from heaven assures him 
that he has reached the threshold of the '^far 
better''; he arises and ^^ departs," that he may be 
^^ absent from his home in this body and present 
at his home with the Lord." His death is not a 
defeat, but a begun victory, and, inasmuch as both 
soul and spirit are delivered from the underworld 
and the shades of death, he has the assurance that 
the penalty will yet be completely abolished con- 
cerning his body: it is both the assurance and the 
prophecy of it. 

Christianity is, then, primarily, the good news, 
and the doctrinal demonstration, that death as a 
judicial sentence has been abolished for the 
Christian. 

But Christianity is something more than the 
abolition of death — it is — 

Second — The bringing in and revelation of life. 

Through the Gospel, we are told, life has been 
brought to light. 

In the nature of the case this cannot mean nat- 
ural life. 

There was no necessity that it should be brought 
into light. 

It has nevet been in darkness. 

It is manifest everywhere. Light and life are 
synonymous. 

There is not a condition in which in some form 
or other it does not exist. While one class of life 



Chbistianity 67 

may not live in a certain environment, there are 
other forms to which this environment wonld be 
as a hotbed for their production. Life is, indeed, 
nniversal, and may be said to be omnipresent. Yon 
will find it in the deepest depths of earth, and in 
the highest reaches of air. It expands on the 
mountain top, it dwells in the sea ; it is organized 
in the infusoria, it exists in the infinitesimal, and 
reveals itself at last, in the beauty of woman and 
the strength of man. 

As natural life has always thus been in evi- 
dence ; as it has never been in the dark at all, then 
the life which our Lord Jesus Christ has brought 
to light is not natural life — it is new life — a life 
unknown to the world before. 

It does not come from the natural man. It is 
not produced by natural generation. It comes 
from our Lord Jesus Christ and by supernatural 
generation. It did not come from him while he 
walked the earth. At no time during his earthly 
career did a human being receive it. The disciples 
who followed him — he who leaned upon his breast 
at supper and was the disciple whom Jesus loved 
— knew nothing of it. This new and unique life 
was brought into the light only when that light 
shone from his empty grave. He gave it forth 
and communicated it to men only when, as the 
risen man, he ascended up on high. It comes from 
him as the second man, as the last Adam, that 
Adam to whom the first was only as the clay model 
to the completed statue, as concept is to consum- 



68 Cheist, Cheistiajstity and the Bible 

mation. It comes from him wlio is both God and 
man, in one body and one person forever; and 
who, as such, is the head and beginning of the new 
creation of God. 

By him it is communicated to those who own 
him as their atoning sacrifice. 

The instrument is the word of the Gospel. 

The agent is the Holy Spirit. 

The Word is preached — it falls into the heart 
of the believer as seed into the ground. 

The Spirit quickens it — the new life is ger- 
minated. 

That new life is the life and nature of the risen 
one, our great God and Saviour Jesus Christ, the 
man in the glory; it is the mind of him who is 
called Christ, and it is, therefore, in final term — 
^Hhe mind of Christ." 

It is wrought, not in the soul, but in the spirit 
of the believer. 

By no slow process does it enter — this life of 
the risen Lord — but by absolute fiat — the fiat of 
him who said — ^'Lazarus, come forth. '^ 

It is fiat life. 

Its entrance into a human being is as light 
flashes into darkness. 

It is as instantaneous as when God of old said, 
^'Let there be light," and light burst over a world 
cataclysmically fallen into chaos. 

It is as transforming as when morning awakens 
the sleeping earth and hill and dale, river and sea, 
shine forth in their beauty. 



Chbistianity 69 

It is as startling as when Lazarus himself, obey- 
ing the voice of his Lord, rose from the dead and 
came forth. 

Behold the illustration of it. 

Here is a man who grovelled in the lowest 
animalism. 

He was a husband and father. What a hus- 
band ! and what a father ! 

She who was his wife fled oftentimes at the very 
sound of his footsteps, shivering with the same 
fear, as though he who had solemnly sworn to love 
and protect her, were a mad brute intent on grati- 
fying his own fierce lust, and ready with un- 
checked sensualism to trample her in the mire of 
his bestiality. A father, whose very name made 
the cheeks of the children grow white and their 
pulses almost to cease with terror. A drunkard, 
who drowned in his cup, not only wife and children 
and home and all outward decency, but every char- 
acteristic of truth and honesty and manhood of 
his own soul. A man, who through self-indulgence 
and the incessant yielding to unspeakable desires, 
had become little better than a human sewer, 
through whom the slime and indescribable filth of 
fallen and degraded humanity found its un- 
hindered course. A human being, who had become 
a lazar spot, a walking pest, whose inmost thought 
rotted and putrified his own mind; and whose 
words without license were a poison and con- 
tagion to every one whose ears caught their un- 
welcome sound. 



70 Chbist^ Christianity and the Bible 

Mark the change in that man! 

The wife now watches at the door with a glad- 
some smile to greet his return. The children, who 
once in their rags trembled with fear, now clean 
and wholesomely clad, and gay with laughter, 
gather at his knee, the moment he enters his home. 
He is himself well dressed. He holds his head 
erect, his eyes, no longer bloodshot, meet your gaze 
with frank and open glance. His tones are soft 
and modulated, his speech gentle. The Bible, the 
one book he always hated, is his constant study. 
His mouth once filled with cursings that might 
well have chilled the blood to hear, now give utter- 
ance to the voice of prayer and earnest thanks- 
giving. The church he never entered and always 
avoided has become the centre around which the 
best activities of his life are continuously moving. 
He who was once shunned, despised and feared, is 
now honored and respected of all. 

The man has been transformed. 

Those who saw him in former days and see him 
now might in all reason ask, ''Is this he, or some 
other manT^ 

It is both he and yet another man. The same 
person, but possessing another character. 

What is the secret of it all? 

Let the answer be graven on every heart. He has 
received a new life, a new, a pure, a holy and spir- 
itual life. He has received that life from above, 
from the second Adam, the Lord in heaven. He is 
now a twice-begotten man. 



Christianity 71 

And herein is the glorious, distinctive feature 
of Christianity in so far as it touches a human 
soul. 

To that soul it brings the good news that a new 
generation is possible; the good news that any 
human being may start over. The good news that, 
no matter how much you may be handicapped by 
your original genesis ; no matter what the terrific 
law of heredity may have transmitted to you, you 
may be generated again. In a moment, in the 
twinkling of an eye, you may have a genealogy 
that shall carry your name above the proudest of 
earth ; a genealogy by the side of which the bluest 
blood of most ancient kings shall be as the palest 
and poorest of plebeian stuff. This Gospel of 
Christianity brings the good news that you may 
receive from the throne of God life from God, 
as directly as did Adam when God breathed into 
his nostrils the breath of life and man became a 
living soul. In an instant you may be recreated 
morally and spiritually, and have in you all the 
assets which, when fully capitalized by the 
grace of God, shall insure your sonship with 
God here, making you master over every dis- 
turbing and disquieting passion, and guarantee- 
ing to you an eternal entrance into the endless 
inheritance of God, wherein you shall be, indeed, 
the heir of God and joint heir with our Lord 
Jesus Christ. In short, you may have the 
bequeathed ability to glorify God and enjoy him 
forever. 



72 Christ, Christiai^ity and the Bible 

This is the life which our Lord Jesus Christ has 
brought to light. 

The Gospel is the good news of this life of which 
the life giver himself has said, ^^I came that ye 
might have life, and that ye might have it more 
abundantly/' That is to say: ''I came that ye 
might have this spiritual life and have it without 
limit here.'' 

And this Gospel of the new life brought to light 
by and through the death and resurrection of our 
Lord Jesus Christ is one of the elemental facts 
and forces which definitely answers the question — 
^^What is Christianity?" 

But Christianity is something more than the 
abolition of death as a penalty and the bringing 
in of a new and spiritual life. Christianity is 
through its Gospel — the good news that — 

Third — Immortality has been brought to light. 

The word here translated 'immortality" is '4n- 
corruption" ; but it signifies in final terms the fact 
of immortality ; for, as mortality is identified with 
corruption and is its consequent, so immortality, 
which is the opposite of mortality, is the 
consequence of incorruption and is inseparable 
from it. 

This word 'immortality" is greatly misunder- 
stood, and almost always misapplied. 

It is continually applied to the soul. It is a 
common thing to hear or read the expression, ''im- 
mortal soul." 

The truth is, that phrase cannot be found in 



CHEISTIAlSriTY 73 

Holy Scripture. The terms are misleading — their 
conjunction is false. Applied to the soul, the 
word ^4mmortaP' is a misnomer. Throughout 
Scripture the original word and idea relate to the 
body — ^never otherwise. The word ^^ mortal" is 
never used of the soul ; you never read in Scrip- 
ture the expression, ^^ mortal soul.'^ You will find 
the words ' ' mortal body. ' ' A mortal body has for 
its opposite an ^4mmortal body." A mortal body 
is subject to corruption and death. An immortal 
body is incorruptible and not subject to death — an 
immortal body can never die. 

The mortal body is the scandal of the race and 
the open label of sin. A mortal body puts us in 
the category of condemned criminals awaiting exe- 
cution. The scandal is not only moral, but or- 
ganic. To be filled with disease, with pestilence, 
with fever, and then die and the body turned back 
to its component parts — this is a scandal in con- 
struction ; as much a scandal as when a house not 
properly built falls down ; a dead body, whether of 
man or dog, is the most shameful blot on the face 
of the earth, and with the gaping mouth of the 
graveyard, justifies the estimate and the declara- 
tion of the living God, that death is an ^^ enemy/* 
not a welcome thing like birth and life — hut an 
enemy. Such a scandal is it, indeed, that when 
our Lord Jesus Christ came to the grave of 
Lazarus, he was himself moved with indignation ; 
for the words, ^^ groaning within himself," miss 
the true force. The Greek verb used signifies that 



74 Chbist, Cheistianity akd the Bible 

he was inwardly filled with indignation and a 
sense of outrage at the sight of the grave and the 
annonncement that the body of Lazarus was al- 
ready corrupt. Whatever groaning came from his 
lips and whatever tears fell from his eyes as he 
wept — these were his protests against death and 
the grave; for he recognized this dead body not 
only as due to the penalty of sin, but as the work 
of him ^^who had the power of death, that is, the 
devil.'' (Hebrews 2:14.) 

Even though the Christian as to soul and spirit 
be delivered from death ; even though he does not 
go down to Hades, but at death is safely housed 
and at home with God in heaven — ^yet the fact that 
this body, which was not only the dwelling place 
of his soul, but the temple and shrine of the Holy 
Spirit, should become a banquet for worms, a 
thing of repulsive decay, a residuum of forgotten 
dust, is a scandal, even to the Christian, and gives 
emphasis to the shame of death. 

The Son of God came into the world to remove 
this scandal. 

He died and rose again, not only that he might 
have power and authority to give a new and spir- 
itual life to men, a character befitting them for 
the high things of God, he died and rose again 
that he might have power and authority to give an 
immortal body to all who would receive from him 
this new and spiritual life. 

He brought this immortality to light when he 
rose from the dead. 



Christianity 75 

He brought it to light by rising from the dead 
in the body in which he had died. 

If our Lord Jesus Christ did not rise from the dead 
in the body in which he died, then immortality in the 
New Testament sense of the word has never been 
brought to light. 

But he did so rise. 

He made that clear on the first Sunday night 
after his resurrection. 

The disciples were gathered together in the 
room. 

The supper table was spread. 

No one cared to eat. 

The story had been going all day that Jesus had 
risen. 

The women said so. They persisted that they 
had seen and talked with him. 

Two men claimed, also, to have seen him, 
walked, talked and broken bread with him, that 
very afternoon. 

The disciples did not believe it. 

They were afraid to believe it lest it should 
prove to be untrue. 

Then, suddenly, he stood in the midst. 

They thought it was his ghost. 

This was a proof to them that he had not risen ; 
for a ghost is a disembodied thing. 

He was a ghost — ^he was disembodied — there- 
fore he had not risen. 

So they felt — each one of them. 

They did not say it — but they thought it 



76 Christ, Christianity and the Bible 

He knew their thoughts. 

He asks them why these thoughts arise in their 
hearts. He upbraids them for their unbelief. 

He tells them plainly, a ghost does not have flesh 
and bones. 

He says, ^^I have flesh and bones. ^^ 

They are still silent. 

Then he stretches out his hands towards them. 
He shows them his feet. 

There are great marks in them — there is around 
these marks as the stain of blood, or of wounds 
whence blood had flowed. 

Still they do not speak. They are afraid to 
believe; it is too good to be true. 

He says to them, ^^ Handle me and see — take 
hold of my feet — feel me — examine me for your- 
selves.'^ 

They are as immovable and speechless as men 
changed into stone. 

He turns upon them quickly and says, ^^Have 
you anything to eat?'' 

They point to the untasted supper. 

Then comes the climax. 

He goes to the table. 

He sits down. 

He eats before them. 

It is of record that he did eat broiled fish and 
an honeycomb. 

Either this is the worst fable ever palmed off 
on the church of Christ — on the credulity of aching 
human hearts — or it is the truth of God. 



Christianity 77 

Call it the truth of God — then the body in which 
our Lord Jesus Christ rose was the body in which 
he died. 

That body, stamped and sealed with the stig- 
mata of the cross, is the living, quivering 
definition, and indisputable demonstration of 
immortality. Immortality is the living again in a 
body which was dead and dieth no more ; or, it is 
the change of the body in which we now live into 
an incorruptible, glorious body which shall never 
die. 

In that body which he raised from the dead, 
and which never saw corruption, our Lord 
Jesus Christ now sitteth at the right hand of 
God. 

He is there as the vision and standard of im- 
mortality. 

He is there as the forerunner, the prototype, the 
sample and prophecy of immortality for the 
Christian. 

Until the Christian is made immortal his re- 
demption is not complete. 

The Christian who dies is transported to heaven. 

His estate there as compared to this is ^^far 
better." 

But ^^far better" is not the ^^best." It is only 
a comparative. 

The superlative requires that the Christian shall 
have a body. Without a body the Christian is 
neither a complete human being nor a perfect son 
of God. 



78 Cheist, Cheistianity and the Bible 

The divine ordination is ^^ spirit, soul, and 
hodyJ^ 

Unless the Christian receives an immortal body 
the victory of our Lord Jesus Christ over death 
and over him who has the power of death (that is 
the Devil) is not complete. 

Satan as the strong man armed holds the goods 
and keeps them secure within his house. 

The instrument with which he is armed is the 
law. That law which requires that it shall be 
^^ appointed unto men once to die/' The goods 
are the bodies of the saints, and the house is the 
dark and dismal grave. 

O the pitifulness of it! that our Lord Jesus 
Christ should possess the Christian as a ghost in 
heaven, and the Devil hold his blood-bought and 
spirit-sealed body in the grave. 

A risen Christ is an immortal body, surrounded 
by disembodied Christian ghosts in heaven for- 
ever — that is a concept too hideously grotesque 
to consider. 

An immortal Christ who redeemed his own body 
from the power of the grave, but is unable to de- 
liver the bodies of those for whom he died — to 
think it is blasphemy! to believe it — ^impossible! 

If the Devil be the strong man armed, the risen 
Lord is the one ^^ stronger than he,'' who has met 
and equalled all the demands of the law, and by 
his death nuUijfied its ultimate power over the 
bodies of those for whom he died. 

In the very nature of the case, then, full re- 



Christianity 79 

demption requires that the body of every Chris- 
tian shall be delivered from the grave, and that 
every Christian, whether living or dead, shall be 
clothed finally with an immortal body. 

This is the great objective of salvation — ^not jnst 
to save men from vice and immorality here ; not 
just to fit them with an antidote against the poison 
of sin; or give them an impetus to holiness and 
truth for a few brief years in this mortal body, 
then let them die under various circumstances of 
suffering and pain and be carried away to heaven 
to live there as attenuated, invisible ghosts for- 
ever! 

no ! it is not that ! 

It is true men are to be saved here and now 
in such moral and spiritual fashion as that each 
saved person should make the world sweeter and 
better and nearer to God for living in it. All that 
is true, but it is only a part of the glorious truth. 
The supreme objective — the ultima thule of re- 
demption — is — 

Immortality — the Christian eternally and incor- 
ruptibly embodied. 

And this immortality, this eternal embodiment, 
is to be accomplished for every Christian. The 
fact that death has been abolished officially as a 
penalty for the Christian is a demonstration that 
abolition of death means abolition for the whole 
Christian ; as a whole or complete Christian must 
have a body, then the abolition of death for the 
Christian means abolition of death from the body. 



80 Cheist, Chkistianity and the Bible 

The abolition of death from the body is immor- 
tality; by virtue, then, of the abolition of death, 
immortality is assured to every Christian. 

Not one will be forgotten even though centuries 
may have broken into dust above his grave. 

This immortality will be brought to pass by him 
who is the Eesurrection and the Life. 

It will be brought to pass at the Coming of our 
Lord Jesus Christ. 

He is coming to this world again. By every law 
of necessity he must come. He is coming to com- 
plete redemption, to bring on the capstone amid 
shoutings of '^ grace, grace unto it.'' 

He will raise the dead who have fallen asleep in 
his name. He will change the living ones who are 
his at his coming. He will make the body of each 
incorruptible, deathless, immortal, like unto his 
own glorious body, as it is written: 

^^We shall be like him; for we shall see him as 
he is.'' (1 John 3:2.) 

And again it is written : 

We are citizens of a country which is in heaven ; 
from whence also we look for the Saviour, the 
Lord Jesus Christ ; who shall change the body of 
our humiliation, that it may be fashioned like unto 
the body of his glory, according to the working 
whereby he is able even to subdue all things unto 
himself." (Philippians 3 : 20, 21.) 

At the last he will regenerate the earth. He will 
make it over. He will make all things new. He 
will set this race of redeemed immortals within it. 



Cheistianity 81 

Perfectly recovered from the spoliation of sin and 
death, they shall inhabit it forever. God shall get 
his own world again. 

Paradise lost shall become paradise regained, 
and God's purpose to make man his constitutional, 
governmental, moral and spiritual image shall be 
fulfilled. Man shall be God incarnate, and incar- 
nation shall be seen to be the beginning and the 
ending of the purpose of God. 

This is the consummation to which Christianity 
leads us — a perfect race of immortal beings in a 
perfect world, a perfect world in which no man 
shall say, ^^I am sick"; where sin is unknown; 
where the funeral bell does not toll, and a grave is 
never dug. Where God is all in all. 

This is the hope and the ultimate Christianity 
sets before us. Not once in all its record does it 
offer us heaven or bid us prepare for it as the 
ultimate, but always it exhorts us to look for and 
wait patiently for immortality and glory at the 
Coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. 

This is the Christianity of the primitive cen- 
turies. 

This is the Christianity of the New Testament. 

It is the Christianity that fully met the needs 
of men. 

It met the needs of men who gave themselves 
up to unrestrained passion, to the gluttony of 
every appetite; who lounged away their day in 
cool marble halls, or leaned half drunken from the 
cushioned seats of the amphitheatre, while the 



82 Cheist, Cheistianity and the Bible 

sands of the arena were reddened with human 
blood to give them a holiday. Look at them there. 
They passed their unsatisfying hours in idle jest, 
wreathed themselves with freshly plucked, but 
swiftly fading flowers, drowned their senses from 
moment to moment, still deeper in the spiced and 
maddening wines, gave unbridled freedom to their 
lust ; and then, at close of day, in the splendor of 
the sinking sun, went forth to cool their fevered 
brows in the Campagna's freshening but deadly 
air, and drove with furious pace and brutal 
laughter along the Appian way between rows of 
monumental tombs whose chiselled epitaphs told 
the hopeless end of human life; then back again 
they drove with still more reckless haste to spend 
the night in wild debauch and meet the gray dawn- 
ing of another day with its mocking routine and 
disgust. Loathing their very joys, revolting at 
their own gratification, these men asked: *^Is thelre 
nothing better than this, that we drain the cup 
of pleasure to the dregs, open our veins, watch 
the life blood ebb away, and laugh, and mingle our 
laughter with curses that so cheap and easy an 
ending should have cost so much to reach? '^ 

O the woe, the horror, the emptiness, and the 
crying, agonizing need of lives like these. 

And Christianity fully and richly met the need 
of lives like these. 

It met the needs of men who in the midst of an 
environment of the flesh, with the wild beast of 
appetite struggling within, now and then had long- 



Christianity 83 

ings for a power that should enable them to put 
their feet upon the neck of passion. 

It met the needs of men who, standing above 
their dead, asked again the old and oft-repeated 
question of Job, ^'If a man die, shall he live 
again?'' 

Christianity met all these needs. 

Through crowded streets of populous towns 
and lonely lanes of silent villages, in lordly palace 
and before straw-thatched hovels, to listening 
throngs and wayside hearers, it rang forth its 
wondrous proclamation. 

It told men that a man had been here who had 
proven himself stronger than death and mightier 
than the grave ; a man who had burst the bars of 
death asunder, spurned the sepulchre wherein 
human hands had laid his body, had ascended up 
on high, and now, from heaven's throne, had 
power to impart to men a life that hated sin, re- 
joiced in virtue, could make each moment of 
earth's existence worth while, and carried within 
it the assurance and prophecy of eternal felicity. 

Far and wide, over land and sea, it rang the 
tidings that this perfect life might be had by king 
or cotter, by freeman or slave, without money and 
without price, for so simple a thing as genuine 
faith in, and open confession of, him who had died 
and risen again. 

With rich, exultant note it announced that he 
who as very God had clothed himself with a new 
and distinct humanity, who had loved men unto 



84 Christ, Christianity and the Bible 

death and died for them, had not forgotten the 
earth wherein he had suffered, his own grave from 
whence he had so triumphantly risen, nor yet the 
graves of those who had confessed his name; but, 
on the contrary, was coming back in personal 
glory and with limitless power to raise the dead, 
transfigure the living, make them immortal, and so 
change this earth that it should no longer be a 
swinging cemetery of the hopeless dead, but the 
abiding home of the eternally living sons of God. 

Men held like Laocoon in the winding coils of 
sinuous and persistent sin, and who vainly sought 
to escape from its slowly crushing embrace, heard 
the good news and turned their faces towards the 
rising hope of present deliverance. 

Men standing in the shadow of the tombs and 
waiting their turn smiled until their smiles turned 
into joyous laughter as they said: ^^If we die, we 
shall live again — the grave shall not always win 
its victory over us.'^ 

Do you wonder the world stopped, listened, and 
that multitudes turned and followed after? 

Do you wonder that this Christianity of the 
primitive centuries triumphed so phenomenally? 

This is the Christianity we need to preach to- 
day. 

It is full of a great body of doctrine. 

It is full of the supernatural. 

Miracle and miraculous are woven into its text- 
ure from beginning to end. You cannot touch it, 
or handle it^ or look at it from any angle of vision 



Chkistianity 85 

that it does not suggest the miraculous. The mo- 
ment the miracle is out of it it is no longer the 
Christianity of the first century, it is not the 
Christianity of the New Testament — the Chris- 
tianity that has a miraculous Christ for its centre 
and the miracle of an infinite God for its en- 
vironment. 

A Christianity of doctrine ! 

A Christianity of miracle ! 

And why not? 

It is as superior to the Christianity, so called, 
that sets aside miracle and doctrine, turns its back 
on the hereafter, makes its appeal in behalf of 
the present alone, and grounds its claim to au- 
thority, not on a ^^thus saith the Lord,'' but on a 
^^thus saith science and reason"; a Christianity 
that owns the law of evolution as its present force 
and defining motive ; it is as superior to that sort 
of Christianity and as high above it as the heavens 
are above the earth. 

One night this summer I stood upon a moun- 
tain ridge and watched the revelation of the starry 
sky. The great constellations, like silver squad- 
rons, were sailing slowly and majestically to their 
appointed havens ; from north to south and from 
south to north again, the Milky Way swept up- 
ward from its double horizon to the zenith like a 
highway paved and set with diamonds — a highway 
over which the wheels of the king's chariot had 
sped, leaving behind that cloud of dust in which 
every gleaming particle was a burnished sun. I 



86 Cheist, Cheistianity and the Bible 

gazed spellbound until it was as the vision of an 
unfathomed sea, an ocean tide of light, where the 
shimmering foam was the rise and fall of single 
and multiple systems, the surf beat breaking on 
the shores of converging universes. I gazed on 
this wealth and congeries of far-flung worlds, in 
which some that appeared the most insignificant 
and twinkled and trembled as though each glimmer 
would be the last, were actually so great that be- 
side them our own poor little world was but as a 
mole hill to earth's Himalayas; as I gazed I 
thought of the distance from world to world- 
measured as light travels — ^till the count of years 
fell away, and there were no more numbers with 
which to count, and I knew that at the end of this 
calculation I had but entered the suburbs of that 
realm for which we have but one word, whose in- 
adequacy we all confess — the Infinite. I listened, 
the silence seemed to utter forth majesty and 
might and honor and omnipotence, the air had in 
it the breath of sacred and adoring things, and 
unwittingly I cried out, alone in the night there, 
^'The heavens, God, declare thy glory and the 
firmament showeth thy handiwork. ' ' 

And when I look at this Christianity set forth in 
the New Testament, and anticipated in the Old, 
the constellations of doctrine, this Via Lactea of 
truth in which every statement is a sun of splen- 
dor; when I begin to get the sweep of the divine 
purpose coming up from the opening pages of 
Genesis and culminating in the book of the Eeve- 



Cheistiakity 87 

lation ; when I see that Christianity is the presen- 
tation to ns of the ways and means whereby the 
original thought of incarnation (and this was the 
very first thought stamped upon the first pages 
of the Genesis record of the creation of man; for 
incarnation is conceived in Eden before it is 
brought to the birth in Bethlehem) — ^when I see 
this original thought of incarnation, in spite of 
sin and failure, and the world's captivity to the 
Devil and his angels ; when I see this high purpose 
of God at last realized, and realized so completely 
that each redeemed soul is in final terms 
the glorious enthronement of God in humanity, 
and that God in Christ and in the Christian, 
gets his own world again, I cry out with full 
tribute of heart and intellect: ^^0 Lord, this is 
the Christianity which thou hast wrought, thy 
name is written in every doctrine, every line justi- 
fies, as it proclaims thee, the infinite and gracious 
author. ' ^ 

This is the Christianity to preach. 

Let the preacher preach a Christianity of doc- 
trine. 

There are three important things every 
preacher should preach. The first thing is doc- 
trine. The second thing is doctrine. The third 
and pre-eminent thing is doctrine. The church is 
starving to death for the want of it, the preachers 
are becoming emasculated apologists for lack of it, 
and the world, looking on, is laughing at a limp, 
genuflecting thing calling itself modern Chris- 



88 Chbist, Christianity and the Bible 

tianity and for want of vertebrate strength, un- 
able to stand alone. 

It was doctrine believed in and preached which 
sustained the martyrs and gave courage to mis- 
sionaries. He who believed in the sovereignty 
of a redeeming God, the certainty that God would 
get his elect, the Coming of Christ, the millennial 
triumph, and a rebel world surrendered at the feet 
of God, could endure the agony of the stake, the 
privation of the wilderness, and all the discom- 
forts and all the discouragements of fields of en- 
deavor well sowed but scantily reaped. 

Let the preacher preach the supernatural — the 
things that are miraculous, and be unafraid. 

He need not be afraid. The world wants that 
sort of preaching. It is growing tired at heart of 
mere machinery and this eternally running up 
against a formula of the laboratory or a mathe- 
matical calculation and analyzed force, as explana- 
tory of everything in heaven and in earth. It 
would like, if it were possible, to believe in some- 
thing a little beyond the length of its eyelashes 
and the touch of its finger tips; something that 
cannot be summed up always in avoirdu- 
pois; something, indeed, beyond the ability of 
man. 

Let the church get back to the old-fashioned 
doctrinal, supernatural, miraculous Christianity 
that underwrites itself with the name of God. Let 
it be boldly proclaimed that Christianity is 
miraculous, because it is, first and last, the Chris- 



Christianity 89 

tianity of that God who is himself — the eternal 
miracle. 

The very salvation of the church as a church 
depends upon this retrograde. 

If the church hesitates, compromises, seeks to ac- 
commodate its formulas to modern nomenclature. 
If it is willing to carry its baggage at half weight ; 
if it is willing to make its proclamation a continual 
denial of all that it has heretofore professed as 
fundamental; if it believes the twentieth century 
has the call on the first, and that modernism out- 
ranks primitivism ; if, in short, it looks upon prim- 
itive and apostolic Christianity as the feeble hint 
which the modern thinker has known how to 
modify and improve, then, as already sug- 
gested, the days of its spiritual and moral 
bankruptcy are in sight, and the sooner good 
business arrangements are made to hire out its 
meeting houses for ethical and social culture the 
better. 

Let the church persevere in turning its back 
upon the hereafter; let it continue the folly of 
ignoring the eschatological emphasis of Chris- 
tianity; let it keep on giving to men the anodynes 
of mere moral maxims ; let it direct all its energies 
to improving and perfecting a society which God 
has already judged and condemned at its best, and 
presently these drugged and befooled people will 
awake, the drugs will no longer be effective, and 
they will turn in indignation upon a Christianity 
which began by professing to be a revelation from 



90 ChKIST, CHRISTIAISriTY AI^TD THE BiBLE 

God and ends by confessing to be nothing more 
than an evolution from man. 

It is time for preachers to arouse if they would 
have the hearing, and not the indifferent ears. 

Let them refuse to apologize or defend. 

Let them have the courage of divine conviction. 

Let them refuse to admit into their fellowship 
men who are willing that a bar- sinister shall be 
stained across the birth hour of the Christ; who 
are ready to smile away such a title as '^fhe Bles- 
sed Virgin''; who can read no deeper meaning in 
the cross than a brutal murder, and who do not 
yet know that in the garden of Arimathea thefe is 
still an empty tomb. Let them refuse ministerial 
ordination and partnership with men who, bearing 
the university brand, claim the authority of a self- 
elected scholarship to make the Word of God sec- 
ondary to the word of man. Let them go forth 
and proclaim to the world with the voice of assur- 
ance which permits of no debate and will accept 
no recall, the Christianity that is summed up, is 
perfectly defined and holds inclusively all its splen- 
dor of doctrine in the three immense facts which 
its Gospel proclaims : 

The abolition of death, the gift of a new and 
spiritual life, and the guaranty to every believer 
of a resplendent immortality like unto his who sits 
on yonder throne — ^both eternal God and immortal 
man — Coming Bridegroom and Triumphant King. 

Let them preach this. Let them tell the guilty 
sinner that the blood of Our Lord Jesus Christ 



Christiaitity 91 

meets his case and can make the foulest clean ; let 
them tell the slave-bound sinner that in a moment, 
in the flash of an eye glance, a risen Saviour can 
deliver him and set him free; let them tell the 
dying that death has lost its sting, and at death 
a convoy of heaven's host shall bear him away 
from his home in this mortal body to be at home 
in heaven with his ascended Lord; let them cry 
above every Christian grave, louder than the 
sound of any falling tear: ^^ Jesus is coming to 
raise your dead and change the living and clothe 
each saint with immortal beauty ''; let them look 
abroad upon a world full of the storm of sin, the 
tumult of high passion and long rebellion against 
our God, and shout aloud that victory cometh in 
the end; that Christ is God as well as man; that 
the days of his glory are at hand, when the ' ' God 
of the whole earth'' shall he be called; and when all 
beneath a perfect heaven in a perfect world shall 
know him as Lord and God from the least to the 
greatest. Let them preach this, and with un- 
broken confidence repeat the exultant words of 
Holy Writ, the words which shall warrant all their 
speech, that ^^our Saviour Jesus Christ hath abol- 
ished death, and hath brought life and immor- 
tality to light through the Gospel"; and it will be 
this Gospel echoing forth with all the music of 
its joyful tidings that shall answer infallibly and 
beyond all dispute the question of the hour — 
^^What is Christianity?/^ 



Zhc Bible 

THE WOED OF GOD 

" When ye received the word of God which ye heard of us, ye 
received it not as the word of man, but as it is in truth, the 
word of God." (1 Thessalonians 2:13.) 

^^H^^HE Apostle here testifies that lie believes 
M C"\ himself to be the bearer of a revelation 
^ J direct from God; that the words he 

^^^^ speaks and the words he writes are not 
the words of man, but the Word of God, warm 
with his breath, filled with his thoughts, and 
stamped with his will. 

In this same epistle he writes : 

^^For this we say unto you by the word of the 
Lord.^' (1 Thessalonians 4:15.) 

The preposition ^^by'' is the dative of investi- 
ture as well as means, and is Paul's declaration 
that what he is writing to the Thessalonians are 
not his ideas, clothed in his own language, but 
ideas and thoughts whose investiture, whose very 
clothing, is no less than the word of the ascended 
Lord — ^he who is none other than the ^^Word of 
God.'' 

Writing to the Corinthians he says : 

^^ Which things we speak, not in the words 
which man's wisdom teacheth, hut (and grammar 

92 



The Bible 93 

requires us to understand) in the words whicli the 
Holy Ghost teacheth." (1 Corinthians 2:13.) 

According to Paul's testimony, therefore, the 
fourteen epistles which he wrote to the churches 
are not letters written by a mortal man, giving ex- 
pression to the ideas and thoughts of man, but are 
the very words of the infinite God, giving utter- 
ance by the Holy Ghost to the thoughts of God. 

An examination of the other epistles of the New 
Testament will show the same high and unqualified 
pretension. The apostles write (all of them) not 
as men who are giving an opinion of their own, 
but as men who know themselves under the dom- 
ination of the Spirit, and as giving authoritative 
expression to the mind and will of God. 

Nor is this peculiar to the writers of the New 
Testament. 

Constantly, the writers of the Old Testament 
introduce their message with the tremendous sen- 
tence : ^ ' Thus saith the Lord. ' ' Again and again 
they declare the Lord has spoken ^^by" them. 
David says : ' ' The words of the Lord were in my 
tongue.'' Jeremiah says the Word of the Lord 
came to him and the Lord said: '^Take a roll of 
a book and write therein all the words that I have 
spoken to thee." Then we are told that ^^ Jere- 
miah called Baruch, the son of Neriah; and 
Baruch wrote from the mouth of Jeremiah all the 
words of the Lord, which he had spoken unto him, 
upon a roll of a book." 

After these words had been read to the princes 



94 Christ, Christianity and the Bible 

of Israel, they asked Baruch, saying, ^'Tell us 
now, how didst thon write all these words at his 
mouth r^ Then Baruch answered them, ''He pro- 
nounced all these words unto me with his mouth, 
and I wrote them with ink in the book/' 

The process is clear enough. The Lord spake 
his words in Jeremiah. Jeremiah received the 
words direct from the Lord, dictated them word 
for word to Baruch, Baruch wrote them as they 
were pronounced in a book ; and when written, the 
words were the written words of God. 

Ezekiel declares when the Lord commanded him 
to speak to the children of Israel, he said to him : 
^' Speak with my words unto them.'' Ezekiel not 
only speaks them, he writes them in the book of his 
prophecy. Ezekiel gives an account of how the 
Lord spake to him and inspired the book which 
bears his name. He says: ''The Spirit entered 
into me when he spoke to me; . . . the spirit 
entered into me and spake with me." The Spirit 
said unto him: "When I speak with thee, I will 
open thy mouth, and thou shalt say unto them, 
thus saith the Lord." 

The Apostle Paul, speaking in commendation 
of Timothy because from a child he had known the 
Holy Scriptures (and by Holy Scriptures the 
Apostle meant the Old Testament from Genesis to 
Malachi — these were the Scriptures Timothy as 
well as every Jew knew as such), tells him that 
all Scripture (and of course any decent exegesis 
of the passage with its weight of context would 



The Bible 95 

arecognize that the Apostle was referring to the 
Scriptures Timothy had known from childhood, 
the Scriptures as we have them to-day from Gen- 
esis to Malachi) — Paul tells Timothy in the most 
precise terms that all these writings are inspired 
of God. 

The Apostle Peter, corroboratively speaking of 
these very Scriptures of the Old Testament, says 
they came not ''by the will of man, but holy men 
of old spake as they were moved (literally, carried 
along) by the Holy Ghost. '' 

Thus, this book we call the Bible comes to us 
with the enormous and uncompromising claim 
that it is not a man-made book, but a book whose 
real and sole author is the living and eternal 
God. 

This claim stands face to face with human need. 

Here we are from birth to death, pilgrims on 
the highway of time, not knowing whence we 
come, nor whither we go. We need a guide to 
lead us, a light to shine when we stand at that part- 
ing of the ways — ^where eternity becomes the end 
of time. 

This book meets us and claims to be all that — a 
guide through time, a light to shine upon the road 
that leads to God and to be, in every line and 
accent, the inspired, incorruptible, infallible Word 
of God. 

How may we know it is all it claims to be? 

Never more than now did we need to know it. 

Voices in the air are crying that we have been 



96 ChKIST, CHKISTIAISriTY AND THE BiBLE 

deceived; that this book upon which onr fathers 
pillowed their heads when at the end of life's jour- 
ney, they laid them down to die ; this book we have 
held as a lamp to our feet and a light to our path 
is, after all, at its best, only the word of man and 
not the Word of God at all. 

Every now and then resounding blows are heard 
as they strike against the old foundation. Those 
who pretend to be working in the interest of the 
truth bid us stand aside, lest we and our hopes be 
buried in the impending ruin. 

We need to know at any cost whether this splen- 
did and sustaining faith has deceived us ; whether 
this book we have looked upon as holy and divine 
is nothing more than the word of man, spoken 
with his stammering tongue and written with his 
stumbling pen. 

We must know, and know for a certainty that 
will leave no peradventure to arise as a troubling 
after-ghost, whether this Bible is, as Paul says it 
is, in truth, the Word of Grod; and the question 
will insistently repeat itself: 

^^How may we know the Bible is the Word of 
Godr' 

The question need not make us tremble. 

The answers are at hand. 

The evidence is so great, its very wealth is an 
embarrassment. 

That evidence stated, detailed, analyzed and 
elaborated, would require — not a few pages — but 
whole libraries. 



The Bible 97 

One broad and general proposition may be laid 
down. 

It is this : 

The Bible is proved to BE the Word of God when it 
is shown to be NOT the word of man; and it is proved 
to be not the word of man when it is shown to be — 
not such a book as a man WOULD write if he 
COULD ; nor such a book as a man COULD write if 
he WOULD. 

That it is not the word of man — not such a book 
as a man would write if he could, is made clear 
enough by the picture it paints of the natural man. 

This picture is so sharply drawn, the figures 
stand out in such living and apt delineation, that 
no one can mistake the import. 

According to the Bible, man came direct from 
the hand of God. God created him body, soul and 
spirit — a tripartite being. The soul was the per- 
son, the seat of appetite and passions. The spirit 
was the seat of the mind, the centre of reflection. 
Spirit and body were the distinct agents of the 
soul. The spirit, the agent to connect the soul 
with God — the body, the medium of the soul's 
manifestation or materialization in this world, and 
the instrument for its use and enjoyment. The 
mind, seated in the spirit, was intended, under the 
influence of the spirit, to be the governor and reg- 
ulator of the soul — enabling the soul rightly to 
use its appetite and legitimately to satisfy its 
passions. 

Thus organized, God set man up in the world 



98 Cheist, Christianity and the Bible 

to be his constitutional, moral, spiritual and gov- 
ernmental image — ^his likeness morally — his image 
(his representative) administratively. 

Man turned his back on God, listened to the 
appetite of his soul, and surrendered to the de- 
mands of sensual hunger. 

The soul, at once, sank down into the environ- 
ment of the body. The mind sank down into the 
environment of the soul and became, henceforth, 
not a spiritual mind, but a mind ^^ sensual,'' 
^'devilish," a mind continually suggesting to the 
soul fresh and unlimited gratification of its de- 
sires. "With the breakdown of soul and mind, the 
spirit lost its vital relationship to God, lost its 
function as a connecting link with, and a trans- 
mitter of, the mind and will of God; so that it 
could no longer enable man to know and under- 
stand God ; and feeling the influence of the mind, 
instead of influencing it, followed it in its down- 
ward course into the environment of the soul. 

Out of this dislocation the soul came forth dom- 
inant over mind and spirit. Soul appetite and 
soul desires became supreme ; the body, the willing 
and active agent thereof. From this period on, 
man was no longer a possible spiritual being, but 
a '^natural'' man. The word ^^ natural'' is ^^soul- 
ical." In Scripture it is twice translated '^sen- 
sual." The much-used word ^^psychological" is 
a derivation of it. In the Bible sense of the word, 
a psychological person is just the opposite of a 
pneumatical or spiritual person. 



The Bible 99 

Man was now psychological, soulical, sensnal. 
He had been transformed into a being no better 
than an intellectual animal, and the slave of his 
physical functions. Instead of being the master 
of his appetites, he was mastered by them. His 
passions intended, nnder right use, to be blessings, 
became curses ; instead of angels, they became as 
demons. Instead of dwelling in the midst of his 
endowment in harmony with it and able to direct 
it, he found himself at its mercy, incessantly smit- 
ten by it and suffering his own equipment. Ee- 
pudiating faith, walking by sight, talking of 
reason and governed by his senses, he threw him- 
self open to invasion by the world, the flesh and 
the Devil. 

As a result of his fall, man has become a de- 
generate, full of the germs of evil, ^^ every 
imagination of the thoughts of the heart only evil 
continually" — an incurable self -corrupter. 

In him there is not one thing that commends 
him to a holy God; and even should he succeed 
in living a life of perfect morality, his best 
righteousness in the sight of God would be 
no better than a bundle of filthy and contagious 
rags. 

There is no power within him by which he can 
change the essential character and determined 
trend of his life. Men do not gather grapes of 
thorns, nor figs of thistles. All the effort that the 
most devoted and laborious of men might give 
to the culture of a hedgerow of thorns would not 



100 Chbist, Christiai^ity ain-d the Bible 

succeed in producing one grape. Though men 
spent life and fortune in cultivating a field of 
thistles, they would not gather a single fig. No 
sooner (says the Bible) can the natural man bring 
forth the fruit of righteousness unto God. The 
Ethiopian may change his skin, the leopard his 
spots, before a natural man can change himself 
into a spiritual man. ' ' The carnal mind is enmity 
with God ; for it is not subject to the law of God, 
neither indeed can be/' "The natural man (the 
word 'naturaP is tpvxtfcdg-^ soulical) receiveth not 
the things of the Spirit of God : for they are fool- 
ishness unto him: neither can he know them, be- 
cause they are spiritually {-nvev^rcKQg^ pneumati- 
cally) discerned." ^^The heart is deceitful above 
all things, and desperately wicked : who can know 
it?" meaning thereby that God alone can sound 
the depths of its measureless capacity for sin and 
iniquity; therefore, he says: ^^I the Lord search 
the heart, I try the reins." 

The end of man is to die. 

Such an end is not natural. 

It is unnatural. 

It is violent. 

It is penal. 

It is an appointed punishment : as it is written : 
^^It is appointed unto men once to die." ^'By 
one man sin entered into the world, and death 
hy sin; and so death passed (literally, passed 
through, pierced man ; the seeds of death entered 
him for himself and all his posterity). When he 



The Bible 101 

dies, therefore, be lie never so moral and upright, 
his death is judicial, his taking off is the execution 
of a criminal. 

He is to be raised from the dead as to his body 
(in the meantime, his soul is ^^ dragged" down- 
ward to the prison of the underworld, where in 
conscious suffering he awaits the second resurrec- 
tion and the judgment hour), he will be raised, 
judged, found guilty and cast forth into the lake 
of fire (which is the second death), from whence 
there will be no resurrection of the body (the body 
will perish in the fire — for an immortal body be- 
longs only to the sons of God — the participants in 
the First Eesurrection) ; then, as a disembodied 
spirit — a ghost — ^he will go forth with an inward, 
deathless worm, and an inward, quenchless fire, 
to be like '^a wandering star unto whom is re- 
served the blackness of darkness forever," an 
exile from God, outside the orbit of divine grace, 
love and life — a hopeless, an eternally hopeless — 
human derelict, upon the measureless sea of night 
and space. 

That is the Bible picture of the natural man. 

Is that the picture the natural man paints of 
himself? 

I trow not ! 

Man looks upon himself as a son of God by 
nature, having in himself all the elements of di- 
vinity, and all the forces necessary to shape his 
life aright. He is proud of himself, and talks of 
the dignity of human nature. He describes him- 



102 Christ, Christianity and the Bible 

self in panegyricj magnifies his virtue and mini- 
mizes his vice. 

He flatters himself in his own eyes. 

The two concepts — that of the Bible and that 
of the natural man — are as far apart from each 
other as the heavens are from the earth. 

To man, the Bible concept is false, belittling, 
wholly disastrous and degrading, the death knell 
to any possible inspiration for human effort and 
attainment. It is a concept against which he re- 
volts with all the nature in him, and hates with 
an exceeding great hatred. 

In the very nature of the case, then, the Bible 
concept of man is not due to man ; it is not such a 
concept that he would write if he could. 

The picture which the Bible paints of sin is not such 
a picture as the natural man has ever painted. 

The Bible declares that sin is something more 
than fever or disease or weakness, it is high 
treason against Jehovah, it is a blow at his in- 
tegrity, a rebellion against his government, a 
discord to his being and a movement whose final 
tendency would be to dislodge him from his 
throne. 

The Bible hates sin and has no mercy for it. 

The very leaves of the book seem to curl and 
grow crisp under the fire of its hatred. So fearful 
is its denunciation that the sinner shivers and 
hastens to turn away from a book whose lightest 
denunciation of sin has in it the menace of eternal 
judgment. Like a great fiery eye it looks into the 



The Bible 103 

very recesses of the heart and reveals its intents 
and purposes. It sees lust hiding there in all its 
lecherous deformity and says, he who exercises 
it solely in his mind is as guilty in God's sight as 
though he had committed the act. It looks into 
the heart and sees hate crouching there with its 
tiger-like fangs and readiness to spring, and says 
that he who hates his brother is already a mur- 
derer. 

The Bible has no forgiveness for sin until it 
has been fully and fearfully punished. In this it 
simply echoes the law stamped and steeped in 
nature. Nature never forgives its violated law 
until it has punished it. The Bible demands satis- 
faction, complete and absolute, before it offers 
even the hint of forgiveness. It takes the guilty 
sinner to the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ and 
shows him God's hatred of sin to be so great, that 
the moment his holy and spotless Son representa- 
tively takes the sinner's place, he smites him and 
pours out upon him a tidal sweep of wrath in a 
terror of relentless judgment and indignation so 
immense, that the earth quivers like an aspen, 
rocks to and fro, reels in its orbit till the sun of 
day refuses to shine, and the moon of night hangs 
in the startled heavens like a great clot of human 
blood. 

The Bible declares that forgiveness of sin can 
come to the sinner only by way of the anguish and 
punishment of the cross; and that no sinner can 
be forgiven till he has accepted the downpour of 



104 Chbist, Christianity aitd the Bible 

the wrath of God on the cross and the substitu- 
tional agony of the Son of God as the punishment 
he himself so justly deserves. 

The Bible teaches that in the awful cry, ^^My 
God, my God, why hast thou forsaken meT' the 
sinner should hear the echo of his own agony, as 
of one forsaken of God and swept out of his pres- 
ence forever; and that the only ground of ap- 
proach to this righteous God is the atoning blood 
of his crucified Son ; that he who would approach 
God, find forgiveness and justification, must claim 
that crucified Son of God as his sin-offering, his 
vicarious sacrifice, his personal substitute. By 
the hell of the cross alone can he find the heaven 
of forgiveness and peace. 

Is this man's attitude to, and definition of, for- 
giveness and peace? 

It is not. 

Man does not hate sin. He loves it. He rolls it 
as a sweet morsel under his tongue. He condones 
it in its worst form. To him it is genital weak- 
ness or an overplus of animal life — an exuberance 
of the spirit. It is a racial inheritance and not an 
individual fault. It is temperamental and not 
criminal. 

The Bible concept and the natural concept of 
sin contradict each other; both, therefore, cannot 
have the same author. 

The Bible concept of holiness is not the concept of 
the natural man. 

In the Bible, holiness is not goodness and kind- 



The Bible 105 

ness, nor even morality. Holiness as the Bible 
sets it before ns is the correspondence of the soul 
with God, the soul reflecting the intent, desire 
and innermost character of God; so that, were 
God to enter into the sonl, he should find him- 
self as much at home as upon his own exalted 
throne. 

Such a definition as that makes human perfec- 
tion and all its claims to holiness seem no better 
than a painted wanton dressed in the garb of 
purity and mouthing the words of virtue and 
chastity. 

"Whence comes this wisdom of holiness which 
makes the loftiest ideal of man no higher than the 
dust of the roadway, his best righteousness criti- 
cizable goodness and altogether a negligible quan- 
tity?^ . 

If it is from man, it must arise from two sources 
— ^human experience or human imagination. 

It cannot come from human experience ! no nat- 
ural man in the past has experienced it — ^none to- 
day experience it. 

It cannot come from imagination; for a man 
cannot imagine what he has not seen, known or 
experienced. As he has not experienced holiness 
he cannot imagine it. 

In the nature of the case — the Bible concept of 
holiness did not originate with man, and that much 
of the Bible, evidently, is not of man. 

That the Bible is not the word of man is shown by 
its statements of accurate science, written before men 



106 Christ, Christiakity aistd the Bible 

became scientific, and while as yet natural science did 
not exist. 

The record of creation is given in the opening 
verses of Genesis. 

Whence came the wisdom which enabled the 
writer in a pre-scientific age to set forth a cos- 
mogony in such a fashion that it does not con- 
tradict the latest findings of the geologist? 

The Bible says the earth was without form and 
void. 

Science says the same thing. Over a hot gran- 
ite crust, an ocean of fire, and beyond that an im- 
penetrable atmosphere loaded with carbonic acid 
gas. 

Cuvier, the founder of paleontology, says in his 
discourse on the revolutions of the globe, '^ Moses 
has left us a cosmogony, the exactitude of which 
is most wonderfully confirmed every day." 

Quensted says, ^^ Moses was a great geologist, 
wherever he may have obtained his knowledge." 
Again he says, ^^The venerable Moses, who makes 
the plants appear first, has not yet been proven at 
fault; for there are marine plants in the very 
lowest deposit." 

Dana, of Yale College, has said that the record 
of creation given by Moses and that written in 
the rocks are the same in all general features. 

Whence came the wisdom which kept Moses 
from hopelessly blundering? 

Moses places the account of the original crea- 
tion in the first verse. In the second, he states 



The Bible 107 

the earth fell into chaos. ^^It became (not was) 
without form, and void/' 

Isaiah, the prophet, declares definitely that God 
did not create the earth without form and void — 
God never was the author of chaos — ^he made the 
earth habitable from the beginning. 

The first verse of Genesis records the creation 
of this original and habitable earth. The second 
verse shows, as the result of some mighty cata- 
clysm, that the original earth fell into a state of 
chaos. The second verse, and the verses follow- 
ing, are the record of the making over of the earth 
after it had fallen into a state of chaos. 

Whence the wisdom which taught Moses what 
science in our day is only beginning to spell out, 
that the present earth is not an original creation, 
but a remaking; that the original creation goes 
back beyond the time of shifted crust, of tilted 
rock, of ice and fire and mist and formless chaos? 

Whence came the wisdom and knowledge which 
led Job to say that it is impossible to count the 
stars for number, when it was possible in his day, 
and is equally possible in our day, to count them 
with the naked eye? 

How did he know, what the telescope alone re- 
veals, that the number of the stars as flashed forth 
in the field of these telescopes is utterly beyond 
our computation ; and that in the attempt to num- 
ber them, figures break, fall into dust, and are 
swept away as the chaff of the summer's thresh- 
ing floor? 



108 Christ, Christiaitity and the Bible 

How did he, looking up with that naked eye of 
his, how did he know that in the Milky Way there 
are countless thousands of suns — and these the 
centres of other systems? How did he know that 
world-on-world ranges in the upper spaces of the 
silent sky, so multitudinously that each increase of 
the power of the telescope only adds unaccountable 
myriads until, looking from the rim of those 
nightly searchers, the eye beholds reach on reach 
of luminous clouds, and learns with awe profound, 
that these clouds are stars, are suns and systems — 
but so far away from us and from one another 
that they cannot be separated and distinguished 
by the most powerful glasses; and that these 
clouds, if we really could separate them and bring 
them within the field of our particular vision, 
would reveal themselves as suns and systems so 
numerous, that only the Creator himself could 
number them? 

How did Job know all this in that far day when 
he sat at his tent door in the beauty of the cloud- 
less sky and without a telescope? How did he 
know all this so that he could tell us with absolute 
certainty what we now know only by the aid of 
modern science — that the stars cannot be counted 
for number? 

How did he know what only the modern tele- 
scope reveals, that the North is stretched out over 
the empty place? How did he know that there in 
the Northern sky there is a space where no star 
does shine — a dark abyss of fathomless night — as 



The Bible 109 

if, suddenly, the universe of worlds had come to 
an end? 

How did he know, at the moment when the wise 
men of his day were saying that the earth was 
supported on the shoulders of a giant, that the 
giant stood on a platform made of the backs of 
elephants; that the elephants stood on the back 
of a mighty tortoise, but where the tortoise stood 
none of them said; how did he dare at that time 
to write that God hangeth the earth on nothing? 

How did Isaiah know that the world is round? 
How did he learn to speak of ^^the circle of the 
earth, ' ' at the time when the scientific men of his 
day said that it was four square and flat? 

How did he know of that imponderable ether in 
which the stellar universe is said to float? Who 
taught him to say that God spread out the heavens 
as ^^ thinness,'' when the wise men of that hour 
were teaching they were a solid vault? How is it 
that he made use of the most scientific term when 
he speaks of the heavens as ^^ thinness"? It is 
true in our English version he is made to say that 
God spread out the heavens as a *'tent"; but the 
word ^^ tent" in the Hebrew is pi (doq) and its root 
meaning signifies a thing that has been beaten 
out or stretched into thinness — an elastic thinness ; 
it is a word accurately describing the ether which 
scientific men tell us is so thin that a teacup full 
of it may be blown out into a transparent bubble 
as large as the earth, and, even then, its attenua- 
tion would seem no greater than at the beginning. 



110 Christ^ Christianity and the Bible 

How did Isaiah know all this ? 

Evidently his knowledge and wisdom did not 
come from the knowledge and wisdom of his day. 

That the Bible did not come from man is seen in the 
fact of fulfilled prohpecy. 

Page after page of this book is filled with 
prophetic announcements. 

History and human experience record their 
amazing fulfilment. 

The prophet Daniel gives the history of four 
great world empires, Babylon, Medo-Persia, 
Greece and Eome. 

The rise and fall of these empires are foretold 
centuries ahead. 

The total ruin and perpetual desolation of 
Babylon were announced when the city shone forth 
in the zenith of its splendor. 

Daniel writes an account of Alexander the Great 
two hundred and fifty years before he is born, 
calls him the first king of Greece, describes his 
march for the conquest of the East, the battle of 
the Grannicus, his sudden death at Babylon, and 
the division of the empire among his four gen- 
erals. 

At the hour when Eome was practically passing 
through her travail pains of national birth, Daniel 
foretold its ascension to power, and described it 
as a wild beast, trampling down the nations, ab- 
sorbing into itself the three kingdoms which pre- 
ceded it, occupying the territory once possessed 
by them, and becoming the supreme governmental 



The Bible 111 

power of the earth. Centuries before it took place 
he foretold the division of the Eoman Empire into 
two equal parts. He announced, also, that it 
should be the last universal political power till 
Christ the Lord should come to set up his world- 
wide kingdom. Centuries have passed since Eome 
ruled the world. From that day to this it has 
remained the last supreme world-power. The 
territory once ruled by it is filled with mighty 
nations — not one of them, great as it may be, is a 
universal world-power. 

Where did Daniel get the foresight which en- 
abled him to look on down through two thousand 
years of human history and, in the face of battle, 
intrigue and change, declare, what so far has come 
to pass, that Eome should be the last universal 
empire till Christ came? 

Ezekiel, the prophet, said that the great and 
populous city of Tyre should be taken, cast down, 
and never rebuilt ; and that the Lord would make 
it to be like the top of a scraped rock to spread 
nets upon. 

The city was taken and destroyed. The 
people moved to an island just off the mainland 
and there built a new city. Two hundred and 
fifty years after Ezekiel made his prophecy, Alex- 
ander came, besieged the new city; and, in order 
to take it, built a causeway from the mainland. 
In doing this he tore down and utterly demolished 
the ruins of the old city ; took its stones and timber 
and cast them into the sea; and then, actually, 



112 Chbist, Cheistianity and the Bible 

set Ms soldiers to work to scrape tlie very dust 
that he might empty it into the waters. From 
the hour when it was overthrown to this, the city 
has never been rebuilt; and for centuries it has 
been, and is to-day, like the top of a scraped rock 
— a place where fishermen spread their nets. 

Where did Ezekiel get this knowledge? 

Certainly not from man. 

It will not do to say he guessed it ! 

Egypt was a land of cities and temples. The 
cities were populous, the temples and monuments 
colossal. Avenues of gigantic sphynx led to gate- 
ways whose immense thresholds opened into pil- 
lared halls, where the carved columns seemed like 
a forest of stone. Pyramids rose as mountains, 
and their alabaster-covered sides flashed back the 
splendor of the cloudless skies. The land bloomed 
as a garden. The papyrus grew by the banks of 
the Nile. The fisheries of the mighty river filled 
the treasury of kings with a ceaseless income. 
Art, literature, knowledge and culture were en- 
throned supreme — yet was it a land of false gods 
and a people given over to their worship. 

Speaking in the name of God the prophet an- 
nounced the coming desolation of Egypt. It 
should be cast down. Its fisheries should be de- 
stroyed, its papyrus withered, its cities and 
temples overthrown and the ruins scattered over 
the plain, no native prince should ever again sit 
upon its throne, it should become the basest of 
kingdoms. 



The Bible 113 

It has become such. 

Its cities are destroyed. Its temples are roof- 
less, its columns fallen, the statues of its kings 
lie face downward in the dust, the pyramids, 
stripped and bare, stand scarred and silent in the 
sun. The singing Memnon are as songless from 
their chiselled lips as the tongueless Sphynx half 
buried in the yellow sand. The fisheries are gone, 
the papyrus has withered ; for centuries no native 
prince has been seated on the throne. It is a land 
of the dead. The dead are everywhere. At every 
step you stumble over a mummy, the mummy of a 
dead cat, a dead dog, or a dead and shrivelled 
Pharaoh. Its greatest asset is its departed glory, 
and every grain of sand blown from the mighty 
desert, and every wave of reflected light flung back 
from the Lybian hills, proclaims the terrific ful- 
filment of the prophet's words. 

The prophets foretold the final siege and de- 
struction of Jerusalem. It should be trodden down 
of the Gentiles. The people should be carried 
away captive and sold into all lands. They should 
be scattered from one end of the earth to the other. 
All nations should despise them. They should be- 
come a by- word, a hissing and a scorn. They 
should be hunted, hounded and persecuted. Their 
suflPerings should be unparalleled, horrible, un- 
speakable. The sound of a shaken leaf should 
startle them. They were to become the people of 
the trembling heart and the wandering foot. 

The prophecies have been singularly fulfilled. 



114 Cheist^ Chbistianity and the Bible 

Jerusalem was besieged by the Eomans. The city 
was taken. The city and temple were destroyed. 
Hundreds of thousands perished by famine, by 
fever, by fire and by sword. Titus^ the Eoman 
conqueror, drove a ploughshare over its smoking 
ruins. The people who remained alive after the 
general slaughter were carried away captive. 
They were scattered from one end of the earth to 
the other. They have found their dwelling place 
among all nations. They dwell everywhere and 
are at home nowhere. They have been a by-word, 
a hissing and a scorn. Every hand has been 
turned against them. They have been hunted on 
the mountains. They have been chased through 
the valleys. They have been walled up in the nar- 
row and filthy ghettos of cities. Their goods have 
been stolen. Their wives and daughters have been 
ravished. They have been whipped and racked 
and tortured. They have been broken on the 
wheel, burned at the stake, buried alive, and sent 
to sea, thousands of them, in sinking ships. Every 
cruelty that the ingenuity of man and the inspira- 
tion of fiends could suggest has been practised 
upon them, until the heart revolts and the soul 
sickens at the mere recital of their blood and woe ; 
and to this hour, through twenty long centuries, 
Jerusalem, as announced, has been trodden down 
of the Gentiles ; all nations have tramped through 
her streets, overridden her people and torn down 
her walls. 

The prophets said God would make a full end 



The Bible 115 

of the nation wliicli persecuted them ; but he would 
not make a full end of them, he would preserve 
and multiply them. 

The promises have been kept. 

Eome has become a past tense. With thought- 
ful steps we pause amid her ruins, painfully 
locate the palace of her kings, the arenas of her 
pleasure, the abodes of her vice ; on fallen column 
or broken tablet, we read the story of her past 
victories, her mighty conquests, and standing be- 
neath a crumbling triumphal arch, gaze on the 
sculptured figures of Jewish captives who once 
followed in an emperor's triumphal train, more 
enduring to-day with their stony faces than the 
ruined city which lies prostrate at their feet; for 
while Eome has passed away, the Jew still lives, 
he has been preserved and has multiplied. The 
Jews to-day number twelve millions of people; 
and these represent but two tribes out of the 
twelve ; so that the two are four times as numerous 
as the whole nation when it came out of Egypt 
under Moses. Their vitality is phenomenal — it is 
miraculous — their multiplication is against all the 
laws and precedents of history. Persecution and 
trial have but increased their fecundity. Like the 
burning bush ever burning but never consumed, 
they continue to exist; and when you draw nigh 
and consider their strange story, out of the midst, 
as of old out of the bush, the voice of him who is 
the ^^I am, that I am'' is heard saying — ^^ These 
are my disobedient but covenant people, whom I 



116 Cheist, Cheistiaitity and the Bible 

have sworn shall be to me as the ^ apple of mine 
eye^ ''; saying, ^^ Whosoever toncheth them tonch- 
eth me.'' 

It was foretold that in the closing hours of this 
age and as a prelude to their final restoration, they 
should bud and blossom and fill the face of the 
whole world with fruit. 

If to-day you seek a representative person in 
every department of human genius and achieve- 
ment, you will find that representative in a Jew. 

The Bible testifies, and testified it centuries ago, 
that in the closing hours of this age, the Jews 
should turn their faces towards Palestine and ask 
(or plead) their way to Zion. 

The prophecy has been, and is being, fulfilled 
to the letter. The faces of thousands of Jews are 
being turned towards Palestine; thousands of 
Jews are asking how is it possible to return to 
Zion. Zionism has passed from the realm of 
dreams to the solid ground of fact. Everywhere 
over the earth societies are formed among the 
Jews to emphasize the return to Zion and the set- 
ting up of the Jewish State. 

It was further foretold that many should return 
thither in radical unbelief and open materialism ; 
that at the entering in of the gates of Jerusalem 
land should be bought and sold and speculation 
become rife. 

To-day there are more Jews in Palestine than 
at any time since the return from Babylon. Land 
is bought and sold at the gates of the city, and 



The Bibli; 117 

speculation in real estate values is running high. 
There is the hum of expectation in the sacred city. 
Palestine is being colonized by Jews. The Turk- 
ish government has taken off the ban, the Jew is 
owned as a citizen and may become a representa- 
tive in its administration. The deserted cities are 
being occupied. Millions of Mulberry trees are 
being planted, the desert and the waste places 
cultivated. The lowing of cattle and the bleating 
of sheep are heard once more. In Jerusalem, the 
wailing place of the Jews is more crowded than 
ever. The penitential psalms are recited, tears 
are shed and the cry goes up with keener lamen- 
tation that the city, beautiful for situation, the 
joy of the whole earth, has become the prey of 
the Gentiles ; that the walls are broken down, the 
holy places laid waste, ^^our holy and beautiful 
house," they cry, ^^ where our fathers praised 
thee, is burned up with fire : and all our pleasant 
things are laid waste. Wilt thou refrain thyself 
for these things, O Lord? Wilt thou hold thy 
peace, and afflict us very sore ? ' ^ And the prayer 
ascends with ever-increasing supplication that 
Jehovah will again make bare his arm in the sight 
of the Gentiles, build up the place of the holy 
assemblies, beautify Jerusalem and establish his 
people. Synagogues are built within the shadow 
of the sacred rock, the one-time threshing floor of 
Oman, which David bought and whereon the holy 
temple stood. The latter as well as the former 
rains are falling. Everywhere it is evident that 



118 Cheist^ Chbistiaitity akd the Bible 

the land is reviving, and the thought of Jndah 
as a kingdom and power among nations, find- 
ing utterance on the lips — both of Gentile and 
Jew. 

And all this activity and Zionward movement 
taking place with the Jew in a condition of spir- 
itual blindness, unbelief and godless materialism — 
as foretold. The very leaders of Zionism (some 
of them) the most outspoken in their repudi- 
ation of our Lord Jesus Christ as Messiah of 
Israel. 

The Bible foretold that the Jews as a people 
would never receive the Gospel: ^^As concerning 
the gospel they are enemies for your sakes" (the 
Gentiles). On the other hand, it was announced 
that the Gentiles, who despise the Jews, should 
receive the Gospel, accept a rejected and crucified 
Jew as Israel's king, and own and acknowledge 
him as the redeemer and saviour provided for 
themselves. 

This prophecy has been fulfilled. 

For nineteen hundred years the Jew — as a Jew 
— ^has steadily rejected a crucified Christ. Here 
and there an individual, paying the penalty of 
scorn and contumely from his own people, has be- 
lieved the Gospel and owned the crucified and de- 
spised man of Nazareth as his very Lord and God. 
He has done so according to that election of grace 
which the Bible foretells (an elect remnant is 
seen through all the ages, under one dispensation 
or another, responding to the call of God — like 



The Bible 119 

the seven thousand who would not bow the knee 
to Baal ; and belonging to that election of grace the 
believing Jew stands out marked and sealed of 
God) but the Jew as a nation with unbroken soli- 
darity refuses to-day the only Jew who can estab- 
lish him in the land of his fathers and fulfil the 
covenant promises. 

Equally fulfilled is the other side of the 
prophecy. 

The Gentiles, who, racially considered, despise 
the Jew and everything of the Jew, to-day own 
and accept this rejected and crucified Jew of Cal- 
vary, not only as Israel's Messiah and king, but 
as the redeemer and saviour provided of God 
for Gentiles; so that the Gentile world now 
worships and adores him as very God, hold- 
ing up the cross of his shame and death as the 
symbol of highest honor and most radiant 
glory. 

The Bible has predicted the final characteristics 
of the present age in terms precise and clear. 

By type, figure and direct prophecy it announces 
that the last form of government among the 
nations just previous to the Coming of our Lord 
Jesus Christ will be democracy — the rule of the 
people: ^'The government of the people, by the 
people, and for the people.'' 

That prophecy practically has been fulfilled. 

Democracy is, nearly, the universal mode 
of government. England in some respects is more 
democratic than the United States. France, Por- 



120 Chbist, Chkistianity akd the Bible 

tugal and Switzerland are repnblics. Spain, Italy 
and Greece are constitutional monarchies ; that is 
to say, the people are recognized as the ultimate 
authority. The Northern nations, Norway, 
Sweden, Denmark, Holland and Belgium, are lib- 
eral kingdoms. The monarchy is simply a fashion 
— the people are the rulers. Germany is a military 
nation. The Kaiser, speaking at times as the war 
lord, gives the impression that he is absolute 
emperor. He is far from it. The socialists 
count their votes by millions, and while the Ger- 
man people accept the empire, they do so because 
it is the most satisfactory agent for their business 
and prosperity. The German people behind the 
throne are the absolute power; and the voice of 
democracy makes no more radical utterance and 
demand than in the German kaiserreich. Ee- 
cently, in a public interview, the Kaiser is re- 
ported to have said, he expected his son to be the 
last emperor of Germany, as within fifty years 
the whole world would become democratic. Aus- 
tria is still more or less under the influence of 
Caesarism, but beneath the surface, the various 
peoples and nationalities constituting that empire 
are restless, feverish, and full of democratic ideas. 
Turkey has been shaken by a revolt of ^^The 
Young Turks, ' ' and the demand for more popular 
government. Japan has broken loose from the 
customs and traditions of centuries — her flag is 
the symbol of the rising sun, and indicates that 
she is seeking to take her place in the new dawn 



The Bible 121 

of popular sovereignty. CMna, the oldest civiliza- 
tion and the mightiest population, has become a 
republic, her young men returning from the univer- 
sities of Europe and America having sown broad- 
cast the seed of democracy and the claim of the 
people. Eussia, alone, remains absolute in name, 
but the absolute has been shattered even there — it 
is supported only by bayonets and drawn swords. 
Every now and then a sullen sound is heard, 
dying away to be renewed in deeper tones ; it is the 
voice of the people, in spite of the knout, the 
prison and Siberian exile, calling for what they 
claim to be their '^rights.'' 

Everywhere the evidence is manifest that the 
prophecy of Daniel announcing the rise of the 
'^ clay^' (Daniel's symbol of the people) and the 
warning of Isaiah that ^^the nations should rush 
like the rushing of many waters,'' and ^^make a 
noise like the noise of the seas," are being ful- 
filled. 

After ^^Clay," or Democracy, there remains 
only anarchy, or power in the hands of an absolute 
ruler. That absolute, world-wide ruler is declared 
by all the prophets to be the Son of Grod, and his 
kingdom is symbolized by a stone — a stone is the 
very opposite of clay. 

THE CLAY IS HEEE! 

Centuries ago the Bible declared that in the 
closing hours of this age the whole world would 
be under arms, preparing for a gigantic and final 
war ; that each nation would turn itself into a vast 



122 Cheist^ Chkistiakity and the Bible 

army, and that the whole earth would become a 
military camp and field of manoenvre. 

This prophecy is being fulfilled. 

A universal preparation for war is going on 
with maddening haste. Nations are seeking to 
outdo each other in their colossal preparation for 
the approaching strife. Armies are no longer 
mere levies or hired cohorts, every man in the 
nation capable of bearing arms or in any wise 
doing military duty is enrolled, and must take 
his place as a soldier. During the summer im- 
mense armies move out of their barracks and play 
seriously the game of war. Each nation has its 
field manoeuvres and theme of attack and defence. 
On every side is heard the tramp of marching feet, 
the sound of bugle call, the rumble of artillery, the 
sharp word of command. 

Nations are vying with each other in the en- 
deavor to cover the sea with the swiftest and most 
powerful battleships. Millions are being put into 
guns and ammunition. The money of the people 
is being poured out like water to obtain war ma- 
terial. Forges and foundries are working to turn 
out the most destructive implements. The arsenals 
are being gorged with cannon, with shot and shell. 
Enormous sums of money in gold are stored away 
in impregnable fortresses that, as the sinew of 
war, it may be ready to respond at a moment's 
notice. Never before in the history of the world 
has there been such a spectacle. 

On land and sea men are silently, ceaselessly 



The Bible 123 

preparing for the irrepressible and impending 
conflict. Each nation feels its existence is at 
stake ; not a thinking statesman who does not feel 
assured that, sooner or later, the clash will come. 
All feel it will be fierce, titanic, fateful and final. 

The Bible foretold the great apostasy as mani- 
fested in the Eoman Catholic Church, the rise of 
Protestantism, its ultimate breakdown in rational- 
ism and open infidelity (that condition of which it 
should be said, ^^they will not endure sound doc- 
trine). It foretold the rising again of Eomanism 
into the place of power and authority (as we see 
it to-day in the United States, where it holds the 
balance of political power and is fast becoming a 
social triumph). 

Who would have had the hardihood to prophesy 
in the hour when Protestantism was delivering its 
terrible blows against Eomanism, overturning the 
tables of the priests, who sold their infamous 
wares of papal indulgences, breaking idols and 
images in the churches, and driving the church of 
the priesthood, the mass and auricular confession 
swiftly downwards to the waters of the Mediter- 
ranean and, while it was repudiating this apostate 
church (which set up saints and images in the 
place of the Son of God, exalted works of merit 
instead of the cleansing power of the blood) con- 
tinually cried aloud the glorious doctrine of justi- 
fication by faith, and whose supreme watchword 
was — '^The Bible and nothing but the Bible"; 
who, under such conditions as these, would have 



124 Cheist, Christianity and the Bible 

had the conrage to proclaim that in the closing 
hours of this age, this aggressive and biblical 
Protestantism should break up by self-division, 
become fragmentary, its leading thinkers and 
teachers repudiating the Bible as the infallible 
Word of God? Who would have dared to say that 
Eome would come back, ascend into the place of 
authority, sit upon the throne of the world's re- 
spect and receive its honors? Who would have 
said that this church which has set itself up above 
the Bible, claimed the right to change times and 
seasons in defiance of a ^^thus saith the Lord,'' 
and has burned men at the stake for their love and 
devotion to this very Bible, should, at the last, by 
reason of the infidelity of Protestantism, its recog- 
nition of divorce and its indifference to a ^^thus 
saith the Lord," come forth as the defender of 
the Bible, the champion of the home and the guar- 
dian of the sacredness of marriage, concentrating 
all its thunders against the shame and indecency 
of divorce? 

Yet these prophecies are written on page after 
page of this book, and their complete and amazing 
fulfilment looks us in the face. 

What a picture is painted for us in the words 
that follow: 

* ' This know, also, that in the last days perilous 
times shall come. For men shall be lovers of their 
own selves, covetous, boasters, proud, blasphem- 
ers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy, 
without natural affection, truce breakers, false ac- 



The Bible 125 

cusers, incontinent, fierce, despisers of those that 
are good, traitors, heady, high minded, lovers of 
pleasures more than lovers of God, having a form 
of godliness, but denying the power thereof." 

' ' The time will come when they will not endure 
sound doctrine : but after their own lusts shall they 
heap to themselves teachers, having itching ears ; 
and they shall turn away their ears from the 
truth, and shall be turned to fables." 

It is a picture which finds its counterpart in the 
Protestantism of to-day — a Protestantism full of 
worldliness, having a form of godliness, a great 
religious profession, but denying its only power 
(the Holy Ghost), repudiating doctrine and listen- 
ing to every fable of rationalistic philosophy 
sooner than to the truth of God. 

In the letter to the church at Thyatira it is 
written : 

^^That woman Jezebel which calleth herself a 
prophetess (a teacher) to teach and seduce my 
servants to commit fornication (fornication in the 
book of Eevelation signifies idolatry — image wor- 
ship and, also, union with the principles and ways 
of the world) and to eat things sacrificed unto 
idols." 

Jezebel was the Pagan wife of Ahab, king of 
Israel. Jezebel stands for the union of Paganism 
and Judaism. But Jezebel here represents a pro- 
fessed church of Christ. In Jezebel, therefore, 
you have a professed church of Christ in which 
there is a combination of Paganism and Judaism. 



126 ChEIST, CHRISTIAIiriTY AND THE BiBLE 

This symbolic Jezebel teaches the servants of 
Christ to commit fornication — that is, not only 
identification with the world, but idolatry (image 
worship). 

In its full detail, then, we have a professed 
church of Christ in which may be found a mixture 
of Paganism and Judaism. A church where the 
professed followers of Christ are taught to wor- 
ship by means of images. 

Could you find a better, more accurate delinea- 
tion of the apostate Church of Eome — a Church 
which borrows the priesthood of Judaism and the 
idolatry and image worship of Paganism? 

In this book of the Eevelation there is still an- 
other picture. 

In the seventeenth chapter a woman is seen 
seated upon a scarlet colored beast. She is arrayed 
in purple and scarlet. She is decked with precious 
stones and pearls, and in her hand holds a golden 
cup full of the abomination and filthiness of her 
fornication (idolatry). She is seen to be drunken 
with the blood of the martyrs of Jesus. The 
woman is, also, said to be seated on seven moun- 
tains and is, finally, spoken of as that great city 
which rules over the kings (nations) of the earth. 

The woman is called MYSTERY, BABYLON 
THE GREAT, THE MOTHER OF HARLOTS 
AND ABOMINATIONS OF THE EARTH.'' 

In the twenty-fifth chapter of the book, the 
BRIDE OF THE LAMB, the true church of 
Christ, is symbolized by a city— THE NEW 



The Bible 127 

JERUSALEM. Babylon and Jerusalem stand 
always opposed to each other. Babylon is the 
centre of Satanic power and testimony — its name 
signifies mixture, confusion. Jerusalem is the 
centre of God's dealings and testimony — it signi- 
fies peace and righteousness. If, therefore, the 
city of New Jerusalem is a symbol of the true 
church of Christ and the church of Christ is called 
a ^^ mystery,'' then this woman called Babylon, 
said to be a city and also called a '^ mys- 
tery," is a symbol of the false church of Christ; 
and, being a harlot, and the mother of harlots, 
or churches like herself (and thus the Mother 
Church)^ and harlot signifying fornication, and 
fornication, idolatry — ^image worship — then a pro- 
fessed Church of Christ, which teaches and prac- 
tises image worship. 

The great city ruling over the kings of the earth 
in John's day and situated on seven mountains, 
or ^ ^mounts," is EOME; as the city represents 
the woman Babylon who is the symbol of the false 
Church of Christ, then you have a false church 
of Christ seated (and remember, the word is 
^^ seated^') in Rome. A Church seated in Rome is 
a Roman Church; and as the city rules over the 
earth, over the world ; and a world-wide rule is a 
universal rule ; and the word for universal, world- 
wide, is, also, ^^ catholic," you have a catholic 
church; and, seated in Rome (Rome its capital 
centre), THE ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH. 

This Church is said to be drunken with the blood 



128 Chkist, Cheistianity ai^td the Bible 

of the martyrs of Jesus ; and the pages of history 
glued together with the blood of these same mar- 
tyrs, and the burning, blistering record of the 
^^Holy Inquisition," affirm that the astounding 
picture is true in all its crimson and scarlet de- 
tails. 

But the striking feature in the picture, and the 
one that is first presented to us, is that the woman 
(the Church) is carried by a beast. This beast is 
a symbol of government and teaches that the 
Church ^^ rules" over the governments of the 
world, is sustained by the State, has attained to 
^'temporal power." As the picture occurs in the 
third division of the book, and that division relates 
to things still future, we have here a distinct 
prophecy that this Apostate Roman Church shall 
again attain to temporal power, become a State 
Church, supported and carried officially by the 
nations of the earth. 

The exactitude with which the picture has been 
painted, and that, too, at a time when Eome had 
not yet come into the place of full-blown apostasy 
and power; the startling way in which, step by 
step, the prophetic outlines have been fulfilled 
even in our day, are tremendously suggestive con- 
cerning the possibility of its complete and final 
fulfilment; and bid us ask most earnestly — 
whence came the mental eyesight which enabled 
the writer of the book to sketch out for us cen- 
turies ahead of time, that which the page of after 
history reveals to us as facts? 



The Bible 129 

The social, financial, governmental, religious 
and moral condition of the present time have been 
portrayed in the book we call the Bible. The com- 
ing of a special class called ^^rich" men as a 
particular characteristic of this age, the revolt of 
labor, and its cry against the wrongs of capital, 
were all set forth in the epistle of James, nigh 
two thousand years ago, with an accuracy that is 
not to be explained on natural grounds. So abso- 
lutely unnatural is it, that it is perfectly safe to 
say — these things are not such as a man could 
write if he would. 

That the book is not to be explained on natural 
grounds is evident from the fact that it is not a CON- 
STRUCTION, but a GROWTH; not an ORGANI- 
ZATION, but an ORGANISM, growing up from 
Genesis to Revelation like a tree from root through 
trunk and branch to leaf and fruit. 

Each book of the Bible will be found on exam- 
ination to stand related organically to one an- 
other; and that each occupies its necessary and 
sequential order. 

In Genesis, you have the beginning of things, the 
germ and outline of everything afterwards re- 
vealed. 

Exodus gives the redemption by blood of a 
people foreseen and covenanted in Genesis, their 
deliverance by the hand of God from the power 
of the king and the dangers of the land. 

In Leviticus, the redeemed people draw nigh to 
God by virtue of the blood of sacrifice and find 



130 Ohbist, CHEiSTiAisriTy and the Bible 

access to the presence of God through the inter- 
cession of a priest. 

In Numbers, this blood-redeemed people are 
seen on their journey to the better land; we read 
of their trials, their temptations, their un- 
belief, their backslidings and continual moral 
failure by the way, and the never-failing grace 
and love of a covenant-keeping God who leads 
them in a pillar of cloud by day and of fire by 
night. 

In Deuteronomy, the people have the way over 
which they have come, and the dealings of God, 
rehearsed to them, and are instructed and pre- 
pared for the land whither they go. 

In Joshua, the second generation (which stands 
always for ^regeneration) gets into the promised 
land. 

Judges tells how, after being blessed with all 
covenant blessings in the covenant land, the people 
fell into a state where every man did that which 
was right ^4n his own eyes.'' 

Ruth, the Gentile woman, becomes the bride of a 
Hebrew Lord; and the covenant promise of God 
concerning Israel goes straightway down from a 
Gentile mother and a Hebrew father towards the 
throne which is set up in David and owned of God 
as the throne of Christ. 

The books of Samuel, Kings and Chronicles, 
take up the story of the kingdom, and the Old Tes- 
tament leads us on through symbol, figure and 
open prophecy, to a Coming Messiah and a glorious 



The Bible 131 

kingdom till, when we reach the last verse in Mal- 
achi, we lean across fonr centuries of prophetic 
silence, waiting to greet that promised Christ who 
shall be born in Bethlehem ; and who is to be called 
the Son of the Highest ; who is to sit on the throne 
of his father David, ' ' to order it, and to establish 
it with judgment and with justice, from henceforth 
even forever." 

"We listen for the angelic song and the saluta- 
tion to men of good will; and we are expecting, 
later on, to see Zion's king riding up the slopes 
to the Holy City and all the people coming forth 
to cry, ^'Hosanna to the Son of David," and 
^^ Blessed be he that cometh in the name of the 
Lord." 

When you open the New Testament you find 
four books — Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. 

The order of these books is fixed — it cannot be 
changed. 

If Mark be substituted for Matthew^ then the 
New Testament begins without an account of the 
birth or genealogy of our Lord Jesus Christ; no 
intimation is given that he is born king of the 
Jews, and is the expected Messiah. 

If Luke be given the place of Matthew^ little 
mention will be found of the Jewish kingdom of 
heaven ; and our Lord will be seen with a leaning 
towards the Gentiles. 

If the Gospel of John begin the New Testament 
instead of Matthew, then we shall read of him 
who is Son of God rather than King of the Jews, 



132 Christ, Christianity ai^d the Bible 

and the expectation raised by Malachi will seem 
unfulfilled. 

But the moment the order named is followed all 
is perfect, all is harmony. 

Matthew presents our Lord Jesus Christ as the 
Son of Abraham and Son of David; heir of the 
covenant land, and the covenant throne, and at 
once links the New Testament with the Old. 

Mark announces that this King of the Jews 
came into the world to be the Servant of God and 
a blessing in his service to men. 

Luke, although he announces our Lord Jesus 
Christ as King, sets him forth pre-eminently as 
The Man, going among men, eating and drinking 
with them, and speaking in such plain and simple 
terms that the ' ' common people heard him gladly. ' ^ 

In John, this Jewish King, this Servant of God 
and men, this Man among men, who received sin- 
ners and ate with them, is revealed as the Mighty 
God, the eternal Word, the Holy One of Israel, 
who came down to visit his people, was made flesh 
and '^tabernacled'' among them, as of old he dwelt 
in the tabernacle of the wilderness in the Shekinal 
glory above the Mercy Seat and between the out- 
stretched wings of the golden Cherubim. 

Take away the book of Acts, and nothing can 
be known of the origin of the church and its apos- 
tolic history. Without the book of Acts the 
epistles are wholly unintelligible when they refer 
to the Church. 

Do without the Second epistle to the Corinthi- 



The Bible 133 

ans, and you have no revelation of the state of the 
Christian dead either as to their location or con- 
dition. 

Without the Second epistle to the Thessaloni- 
arts you cannot fix the identity of the Antichrist. 

Leave out the epistle to the Hebrews and there 
is no key to Leviticus. 

Without the book of Daniel it is impossible fully 
to understand the book of Revelation. 

No matter at what period the book of Revela- 
tion may have been written, it can have but one 
place in the Bible, and that the last. It must have 
this place because it shows us the f oreview of Gen- 
esis fulfilled: the seed of the woman has bruised 
the serpent's head, Satan has been bound and 
Paradise is regained. 

The Old and New Testaments stand related to 
each other as the two halves of a perfect whole. 
In the Old Testament the New is concealed; in the 
New Testament the Old is revealed. 

Genesis finds its key in the first chapter of 
John's Gospel, and identifies the creator of heaven 
and earth with him who was made flesh and dwelt 
among us as the Son of God. 

Exodus is explained by the First epistle to the 
Corinthians, in which we learn that ^^ Christ" is 
the ^'Passover sacrificed for us.'' 

Leviticus is expounded by the epistle to the 
Hebrews. 

Numbers has its correspondence in the book of 
Acts. 



134 Cheist; Christianity aitd the Bible 

In Nnmbers you have the experience of the Chil- 
dren of Israel in their journey through the wilder- 
ness. In Acts we get the story of the Church in its 
pilgrimage through the world. 

Deuteronomy is to be read with Colossians. 

In Deuteronomy the people of Israel are being 
prepared for an earthly inheritance. In Colos- 
sians the Church is being prepared for a heavenly 
inheritance. 

Joshua stands over against EpTiesians. 

In Joshua the redeemed people have to fight 
with flesh and blood in order to possess the cov- 
enant land. In Ephesians ^ ^ we wrestle not against 
flesh and blood, but against wicked spirits in the 
heavenly places. '' 

Judges may be understood by reading the first 
chapter of the first epistle, and the twelfth chapter 
of the second epistle to the Corinthians. 

The book of Ruth is illuminated by the third and 
fifth chapters of the Ephesians. 

In Euth you have the Gentile bride of a Hebrew 
Lord, the kinsman, redeemer and advocate; 
who presents his bride to himself in the gate be- 
fore all the assembled judges. 

In Ephesians, the Gentile Bride is seen to be the 
Church, the kinsman, redeemer and advocate, 
our Lord Jesus Christ, who, having loved the 
Church and given himself for it, will ^^ present it 
to himself a glorious church, not having spot or 
wrinkle or any such thing. '^ 

The books of Samuel^ Kings and Chronicles, 



The Bible 135 

may be read with tlie four Gospels and the book of 
Revelation. 

In Samuel, Kings and Chronicles, you have the 
story of David, the anointed king, man of sorrows 
and acquainted with grief, triumphant warrior, 
exalted king — Solomon, prince of peace, ruling 
over the established kingdom and the queen of 
Sheba coming from the uttermost parts of the 
earth to own and celebrate his glory. 

In the Gospels we get the story of our Lord 
Jesus Christ as anointed king and man of sor- 
rows. In Eevelation he is seen coming forth at 
the head of the armies of heaven, a mighty war- 
rior, a triumphant king and, at the last, as Prince 
of Peace ruling in splendo:^ over his established 
kingdom; while the Gentiles, coming from the 
uttermost parts of the earth to Jerusalem, bow 
the knee before him and acknowledge his glory. 

Ezra may be read with the latter half of the 
second chapter of the Ephesians. 

In Ezra you have the building of the material 
temple. In Ephesus the building of the spiritual 
temple. 

Nehemiah can be read with the twenty-first 
chapter of the Revelation. 

Nehemiah gives us Jerusalem below. Eevela- 
tion, Jerusalem above. 

In the book of Esther the name of God is not 
once mentioned; but it shows us the unseen God 
acting in his secret providence to deliver his cov- 
enant people, the Jews, from the hand of the 



136 Christ, Christiakity and the Bible 

Gentile oppressor, and setting them in the place 
of authority and power over the Gentiles. 

The eleventh chapter of the Romans explains 
the book of Esther. 

In the eleventh chapter Paul shows that God 
has not forgotten the people whom he foreknew. 
The nation as such has been set aside. It is now, 
as Hosea says, Lo Ammi, ''not my people/^ not 
the people of God. 

An election according to grace is going on 
among the Jews. These are being called into the 
Church and will form a part of the Body and 
Bride. The Gentiles have come dispensationally 
into the place of Israel, and God is sending his 
Gospel among them — calling out those whom he 
has foreseen and known among the Gentiles. The 
nation as such would seem to be cast aside. The 
people are walking in darkness and the name of 
our Lord Jesus Christ, their true God and only 
Saviour, is not owned among them; but while the 
Lord is thus denied by them, he has not forgotten 
them. His providences are round about them in 
their preservation and multiplication, and in his 
judgment of the nations which persecute them. 
Their present condition nationally is temporary. 
Paul warns the Gentiles that the Jews have been 
cut off and set aside because of unbelief. The 
Gentiles have been brought in, and stand alone 
by faith. It is well for them not to be ^* high- 
minded,'^ but ^'to fear''; for so surely as God 
spared not the nation and set it aside because of 



The Bible 137 

unbelief, just so surely will lie deal with the Gen- 
tiles if the Gentiles fall into unbelief. 

The Gentiles must not be wise in their own con- 
ceits. The blindness and the setting aside of 
Israel will last only till the '^fulness of the Gen- 
tiles be come in/' that is, till the election among 
them is complete; then the Lord will take up 
Israel as a nation again, and precisely as he de- 
livered Mordecai and the Jews of Esther's and 
Ahasuerus' time and made them to be accepted 
and feared, so, it is written, the Lord himself will 
come forth in behalf of his ancient people. ' ' There 
shall come out of (unto) Sion the Deliverer,'' and, 
' ' so all Israel shall be saved. ' ' 

The book of Esther read in the light of the 
eleventh chapter of the Eomans is illuminating as 
to the unchanging faithfulness of God and his un- 
ceasing love for the nation and people of his 
choice. 

Thus book after book of the Bible may be 
studied; and the more they are examined and 
studied, the more manifest will be the intimate re- 
lation and marvellous correspondence between the 
Old and the New Testaments. 

When you realize the fact that these Old and 
New Testament books, so remarkably related and 
inter-explanatory of each other, have been written 
by different authors, without possibility of col- 
lusion or agreed plan ; that each part fits into the 
other; that it cannot have one book less or one 
book more ; that to take from it would destroy the 



138 Cheist, Chkistianity and the Bible 

completeness, to add would mar the harmony ; that 
it is perfect in itself, having the key of each book 
hung up at the entrance ; that it gives but never 
borrows light; that it cannot be explained or in- 
terpreted outside of itself; that to him who dili- 
gently searches it, it will reveal itself and make 
him wise both for this world and for that which is 
to come ; when all these facts are faced, it ought to 
be evident that in the Bible we have a living thing 
and not a mere handiwork wrought by man ; that 
man can no more claim to be the actual author of it 
than of the mountains that are round about Jeru- 
salem or the heavens that are high above them. 

The unity of a book demands unity of objective. 

This book has a great objective — a supreme 
theme. 

That theme is not Israel — although two-thirds 
of the book considered as a whole are taken up 
with the history of that people. The great theme 
is not the Church of Christ — although the Church 
in this age is the supreme thing in the sight of 
God. The one great theme, the one immense ob- 
jective of this book towards which it moves 
through history and prophecy, through figure and 
symbol, through self-sustained prose and musical 
song — the one great objective is — 

OUR LORD JESUS CHRIST. 

It seeks to present him in his person, his work, 
his present office and coming glories. 

It sets him before us as, 

The Child born. 



The Bible 139 

The Son given. 
The Counsellor. 
The Mighty God. 
The Prince of Peace. 
The Everlasting Father. 
The Lily of the valleys. 
The Eose of Sharon. 
The Branch. 

The Lord our Eighteousness. 
The Lord's Fellow. 
The Man of God's Eight hand. 
He whose Goings forth have been from of oldj^ 
from everlasting. 
The Burnt Offering. 
The Meat Offering. 
The Peace Offering. 
The Sin Offering. 
The Trespass Offering. 
The Sum of God's Thoughts. 
The Man of Sorrows and acquainted witH grief. 
Son of Abraham. 
Son of David. 
Son of Mary. 
Son of Man. 
God the Son. 
King of the Jews. 
King of Israel. 
King of Kings. 
Lord of Lords. 
God the Creator. 
God manifest in the flesh. 



140 Christ, CnRiSTiAisriTY and the Bible 

The Second Man. 

The Last Adam. 

The First and the Last. 

The Beginning and the Ending. 

The Way, the Truth, the Life. 

The Light of the world. 

The Bread of life. 

The Good Shepherd, who lays down his life for 
the sheep. 

The Great Shepherd who came again from the 
dead. 

The Chief Shepherd, who shall appear with his 
flock in glory. 

The Sin-bearer. 

The Eock. 

Our Great God and Saviour Jesus Christ. 

He who is. 

He who was. 

He who is to come. 

He who before Abraham was, is, by his own 
announcement, the ^^I am.'^ 

The Almighty. 

THIS SAME JESUS. 

And to these might be added more than five 
hundred other names and titles, together with 
their cognates, to say nothing of the various char- 
acteristics assigned him, the things predicated of 
him, until it is found that he is the very warp and 
woof of the book. 

To proclaim him, exalt him, make him known, 
set him forth in his many roles, his functions, his 



The Bible 141 

offices and his covenant glories, prophets recite 
their visions, a Psalmist sings his rarest songs, 
and apostles unfold their matchless doctrines. 

When yon contemplate the fact of this one ob- 
jective ; this tremendous unity of intention in the 
book, you have an overwhelming demonstration 
of the unity of its inspiration. Whether the in- 
spiration be a true or a false one, it is beyond all 
question one inspiration. A book whose construc- 
tion extends over centuries, written by men sep- 
arated by time and distance from each other, with 
no possibility of personal or mental relation to 
each other — all writing to one objective — and that 
to set forth the Christ of God in his varied rela- 
tions — a book with such a unity of purpose demon- 
strates in the most self-evident fashion that the 
writers were moved by a common impulse and, 
therefore, a common inspiration. 

And this unity of objective and inspiration co- 
ordinates with the wonderful fact that the book has 
but ONE KEY. 

The key which can alone open this book and 
make every line intelligible from Genesis to Eeve- 
lation is Our Lord Jesus Christ. 

Take Christ out of the Bible and it is a harp 
without a player, a song without a singer, a palace 
with all the doors locked, a labyrinth with no 
Ariadne thread to guide. 

Put Christ into the Bible, and the harp strings 
win be smitten as with a master's hand. 

Put Christ into the Bible, and the voice of song 



142 Cheist^ Chkistianity and the Bible 

is heard as when a lark from the midst of dew-wet 
grasses sings, as it soars aloft to greet the coming 
dawn. 

Put Christ into the Bible, and all the doors of 
the palace are swnng open and yon may pass from 
room to room, down all the ivory galleries of the 
King, beholding portrait and landscape, vista of 
beauty and heaped-up treasures of truth, of in- 
finite love and royal grace. 

Put Christ into the Bible, and you will have a 
scarlet thread — the crimson of the blood — that will 
lead you through all the winding ways of redemp- 
tion and glory. 

Put Christ into Genesis, into the verses of the 
first chapter, and it will chime like silver bells in 
harmony with the wondrous notes in the first 
chapter of the Gospel of John, and tell you that he 
who created the heavens and the earth is he who 
in the beginning was the eternal Word, the voice 
of the infinite silence, and who, creating for him- 
self a human nature, and clad in mortal flesh, 
walked on earth among the sons of men as Jesus 
of Nazareth. 

Put Christ into the twenty-second, the twenty- 
third and the twenty-fourth chapters of Genesis, 
and you will have placed before you in perfect type 
the birth of Christ, the sacrifice, the resurrection 
on the morning of the third day, the setting aside 
of the Jewish nation as the first wife, the coming 
of the Holy Spirit in the name of the Father and 
the Son to find a Bride for the Son, the calling out 



The Bible 143 

of the church, the endowment of the church with 
the gifts sent from the Father in the name of the 
Son, the pilgrimage of the church under the guid- 
ance of the Holy Spirit, the Second Coming of 
Christ, the Eapture and meeting of Christ and 
the church in the ' ^ field '^ of the air, and the mar- 
riage of the Son. 

Put Christ into the dryest and dullest page of 
the book of Kings and Chronicles, and it will 
bloom with light and glory ; and if you watch in 
faith, you will see the King's chariot go by, and 
catch a vision of the King himself in his beauty. 

Put Christ into the Tabernacle, and it will cast 
its treasures like a king's largess at your feet. 

You will see the brazen altar to be the cross, 
the brazen laver, the bath of regeneration, even 
the Word of God. In the Holy Place the table of 
shew bread will speak of him who once said, ^^I 
am the bread of life.'' The golden candlestick 
will remind you that he said: ^^I am the light of 
the world. ' ' The golden altar and the priest with 
his swinging censer of burning incense standing 
thereat will proclaim him as the great high priest. 
The beautiful veil of fine linen embroidered with 
figures of the cherubim in blue, purple and scarlet 
color is (according to a direct Scripture) the sym- 
bol of his flesh, his mortal humanity while on 
earth. Every board and bar, every cord and pin, 
the coverings, the curtains, the blue, the purple 
and the scarlet color, the golden vessels as well as 
the furniture, each and all, proclaim him, illus- 



\ 



144 Chbist^ Chbistianity and the Bible 

trate and illuminate him in his person, Ms work, 
his present office and coming glories. 

All these are analogies, types, pictures, and so 
related to Christ that he alone explains them ; the 
explanation is filled with such perfection of har- 
mony in every detail, the relation between them 
and our Lord Jesus Christ as the Antitype is so 
strikingly self-evident, that any discussion of it 
would be useless. 

When you find a key and lock which fit each other, 
you conclude they were intended for each other. 

In the light of facts already cited, what other 
conclusion can be drawn than that Christ and the 
Bible were intended for each other? 

And when you see this Bible coming together 
part by part, foretelling the Christ and explained 
alone by him, what sane conclusion is possible 
other than the book which is opened and explained 
by him who is not only the Christ but the Personal 
Word of God, must he, and is, THE WEITTEN 
WOED OF GOD! 

Let your mind dwell for a moment on the style of 
the book. 

It is so simple that a child may understand it ; 
so profound, that the mightiest intellect cannot go 
beyond its depths. It is so essentially rich that 
it turns every language into which it is translated 
into a classic. At one moment it is plain narra- 
tion; at another, it is all drama and tragedy, in 
which cataclysmic climax crashes against climax. 

It records the birth of a babe, the flight of an 



The Bible 145 

angel, the death of a king, the overthrow of an 
empire or the fall of a sparrow. It notes the 
hyssop that groweth out of the wall and speaks of 
the cedars of Lebanon. It shows us so pastoral 
a thing as a man sitting at his tent door in the 
cool of the day, and then paints for us a city in 
heaven with jasper walls, with golden streets, and 
where each several gate that leadeth into the city 
is one vast and shining pearl. 

It is full of outlines — outlines as large and bare 
as mountain peaks, and then it is crowded with 
details as minute as the sands of the sea. There 
are times when clouds and darkness float across 
its pages and we hear from within like unto the 
voice of him who inhabiteth eternity; in another 
moment the lines blaze with light, the revelation 
they give is high noon — and all the shadows are 
under the feet. 

It is terrible in its analysis and cold and emo- 
tionless in the hard impact of its synthesis. It 
describes moments of passion in passionless 
words, and states infinite conclusions without the 
hint of an emphasis. It shows us a man in hell 
(hades) and, although it describes sufferings more 
awful than mortal flesh can know, causing the soul 
to shudder at the simple reading of it, it takes 
on no quickened pulse, no feverish rush of added 
speech. 

In a few colorless lines it recounts the creation 
of the heavens and the earth. In language utterly 
barren of excitement it describes the most exciting 



146 Christ, Christianity and the Bible 

and soul-moving event that can occupy the im- 
agination — that moment when the heavens shall be 
on fire, the elements melted with fervent heat, the 
earth and the works therein burned np, and a new 
heaven and a new earth brought into view. 

It is a book of prose and yet a book of sublimest 
poetry. 

The book of Job is a poem by the side of which 
the hexameters of Horace, the drama of Shake- 
speare, the imagination of Milton^ are not to be 
compared. 

In all literature the book of Job alone intro- 
duces a spirit into the scene and reports its speech 
without utterly breaking down into the disaster 
of the commonplace. 

Listen to the account which Eliphaz the Teman- 
ite gives. He says: 

*^In thoughts from the visions of the night, when 
deep sleep falleth on men, Fear came upon me, 
and trembling which made all my bones to shake. 

Then a spirit passed before my face; the hair 
of my flesh stood up; It stood still, but I could 
not discern the form thereof ; an image was before 
mine eyes ; there was silence, and I heard a voice, 
saying, ^^ Shall mortal man be more just than God? 
Shall man be more pure than his Maker T' 

Here is the threshold of the unseen. Before he 
sees or hears anything, the Temanite has the sense 
of fear — the fear of something more than human. 
The unknown weighs upon him and presses him 
down, all the life and energy in him are at low 



The Bible 147 

ebb — he feels as though the tides of life were run- 
ning out. A spirit passes before his face. It is like 
a breath of scarcely moving air out of the night. 
The hair of his flesh (mark the psychological and 
physiological fact), the hair of his flesh stood up. 
It was as if a current of electricity had passed 
through him. Then the spirit stands still. It is 
as though this breath of air out of the night were 
no longer moving. He cannot discern any form. 
There is nothing fixed or stable enough for him 
to perceive. An image is before his eyes. He 
makes no vulgar attempt to describe it — it is in- 
describable. There is a great silence ; then, as the 
margin has it, he heard a still small voice — not a 
loud and jarring voice — but a voice low, soft, still ; 
and yet ! the utterance of that voice ! what immen- 
sity of self-conscious power what authority and 
dignity — the dignity of infinite integrity: ^^ Shall 
mortal man be more just than God? Shall man be 
more pure than his Maker T^ 

How the night is full of a sudden law of pro- 
portion. Mortal man and eternal God. You feel 
the distance widening and widening between them 
there in the stillness of the night. The justice of 
man ! man ! the unjust — the law breaker ; man, who 
is of yesterday and is gone to-morrow — mortal 
man, more just than he of whom it is said, *^ Justice 
and judgment are the habitation of his throne." 
Fallen man, man full of iniquity, shall he be more 
pure than he who made him ; he who breathed into 
his nostrils the breath of life and made him a liv- 



148 Christ, Christianity and the Bible 

ing soul ; he whose name is holiness and righteous- 
ness and very trnth ? As the question lingers man 
shrivels and sinks into the dust, and the whole 
night is filled with stillness — with the stillness and 
immensity of the all-pervading and holy God. 

Eead the thirty-eighth and thirty-ninth chapters. 

They record the highest reaches of human lan- 
guage, so great that our own version cannot dim 
their splendor. Nothing ever written surpasses 
them, not only in the felicity of expression, but 
in the sense of deity pervading them. Each suc- 
ceeding verse sustains the other and, at the last, 
you feel that God, very God, indeed, has spoken. 

The Almighty answers the complaining Job. 

He answers him, not out of the midst of a deep, 
unbroken calm, but out of the whirlwind ; and yet, 
from the centre of that mighty vortex of unlimited 
force and energy and power, the voice comes forth 
with the calmness of one who knows himself 
superior to the whirlwind and the storm. 

'^Who is this that darkeneth counsel by words 
without knowledge?'' 

This is the abrupt and sudden question. It is 
the fitting question of him who knoweth the end 
from the beginning. In the very asking of it all 
the boasted knowledge, the attainment, the self- 
consciousness and vanity of man fade away, and 
man himself is as nothing — God alone remains 
upon the vision — all knowing — all wise — supreme. 

This Bible is a book of history. 

It will spend page after page in describing the 



The Bible 149 

doings of a rebellious king, and then compress the 
story of twenty-five hundred years into a few 
dozen lines, bnt will do this in such a way, by 
means of exact symbols, that the twenty-five cen- 
turies thus compressed will reveal a clearer outline 
and fuller vista than thousands of ordinary vol- 
umes could set forth in detail. 

Mark the providence that has guarded the book. 

Kings and potentates have sought to destroy it. 
It has been thrown into the flames. Volume after 
volume has been burned. But always, and at the 
critical moment, some copy has been preserved — 
here in the cottage of a devoted peasant at the risk 
of his life, hidden in the crevice of a rock from 
the inquisitor's search, or cast aside by a careless 
hand and forgotten amid a pile of swept up dust 
in a neglected corner of some impregnable castle ; 
from whence it has come forth to be copied by 
slow and painful, yet loving, toil, passed from 
house to house secretly as a priceless treasure, 
then printed on concealed presses and at last cast 
forth as living and fruitful seed. 

Men have denounced it and demonstrated that 
it is false both in history and science; then, un- 
expectedly, the stroke of a pick or the turn of a 
shovel uncovers some startling witness of its ex- 
act truth and the excuseless folly of those who 
deny it. 

The fourteenth chapter of Genesis has been set 
aside by the critics as historically worthless. The 
excavations in Babylon have brought to light a 



150 Cheist, Christianity aitd the Bible 

tablet with the name of Arioch, the fourth king 
mentioned in that chapter, stamped npon it. 

The statement in Exodus that Pharaoh forced 
the Children of Israel while building his treasure 
cities to make bricks without straw, has been 
treated as a fable. The treasure chambers them- 
selves have been found, the rooms divided by brick 
partitions eight to ten feet thick — and great quan- 
tities of these bricks made without straw. 

Luke says that Sergius Paulus was pro-consul 
of Cyprus. The critics denied it and proved 
thereby the fallibility of the New Testament. 

The homely but truth-telling spade, and without 
consulting the critic, dug up some coins in the 
island of Cyprus itself, and on the coins were 
stamped both the image and the name of Sergius 
Paulus. 

Luke declares that Lysannius was tetrarch of 
Abilene ; and again the critics denied it and more 
than ever discounted Luke as an historian. 

Eenan, the plausible and analytical infidel, read 
the record carved on the stones of Baalbeck, and 
announced, openly, that Luke is correct. 

From the ruins of Nineveh and Babylon, Tyre 
and Sidon; from the trenches of Tel el Armana; 
by the key words of the Eosetta stone and the 
black but speaking face of the Moabite stone ; from 
newly discovered papyri and parchment, and the 
mystic page of cracked and crumpled palimpsest; 
from the rocks of earth, the depths of the sea and 
the heights of heaven — and from the latest dis- 



The Bible 151 

coveries of science, there arise amazing witnesses, 
which speak in tones that cannot be hnshed, with 
facts that cannot be denied, and bear testimony 
beyond all possibility of dispute to the truth and 
accuracy of the book; so much so, indeed, that 
such an one as Sir John Herschell, the great 
astronomer, has said: ^^All human discoveries 
seem to be made only for the purpose of confirm- 
ing more and more strongly the truths contained 
in the Sacred Scriptures. '^ 

Consider the vitality of the book. 

In less than ten years a text-book is out of date, 
a cyclopedia worthless, and a library a cemetery 
of dead books and dead ideas ; but this book keeps 
living right on — ^keeps abreast of the times, has 
a testimony for every day, and every day borrows 
its youth afresh as from the womb of the morning. 

Science has laughed it out of court. Two hun- 
dred and fifty years ago Voltaire said: ^^ Fifty 
vears from now the world will hear no more of the 
Bible. ^' Self-elected scholarship has pronounced 
it out of date and dead. Again and again its 
funeral services are held. Kind and condescend- 
ing eulogiums are uttered over its past history and 
its good intent. With considerate hands it is 
lowered into its grave. The resqiiiescat in pace 
is solemnly pronounced and lo ! before the critical 
mourners have returned to their homes it has risen 
from the dead, passed with surprising speed the 
funeral coaches, and is found — as of yore — in the 
busy centres of life, thundering against evil, re- 



152 Chbist, Chbistianity and the Bible 

vealing the secrets of the heart, offering consola- 
tion to the sorrowing, hope to the dying, and flash- 
ing forth from its quivering, vital pages the won- 
ders of coming glory. 

While copies of the classics — Virgil, Zenophon, 
Caesar, Sophocles, Pindar and Martial — are to be 
counted by a few thousands, and are cast aside 
by students as soon as they have graduated, and 
are forgotten in a twelvemonth, this Bible goes on 
printing every year millions of copies in all lan- 
guages and dialects of earth; so far from casting 
it aside, when once read, men take it up and read 
it again and again, study it through life, dig into 
it as for hid treasure, and make it the pillow on 
which to lay their dying head. 

"With each succeeding year the demand for it 
increases and voices are continually crying — give 
us The BooJc. 

It is the supreme book. 

It is the book we need when the fire of sin 
gleams in our eye and its poison burns in our 
veins. It is the book we need when the heart is 
sore, when our soul is troubled, and when peace is 
no longer a guest in our home. 

It is the book we need ; for from its pages alone 
do we behold the light which shines from a 
Saviour's empty grave; from its pages alone do 
we receive assurance of the resurrection of the 
dead, of immortality and the life to come; and 
from its pages alone do we hear the tender and 
welcoming words which seek to greet us and to 



The Bible 153 

comfort us while we struggle here ofttimes be- 
neath the burden's growing weight, those words of 
heavenly music: ^'Come unto me all ye that 
labor and are heavy laden and I will give you 
rest.'' 

What author on earth would think his book dead 
and out of date if year after year the publication 
of it taxed the printing presses of the world? 
What author would deem his book out of date 
when the voices of everywhere proclaimed it the 
book of books, and multitudes unnumbered con- 
fessed that from its pages alone they found the 
way of life and peace? 

Such a book is neither out of date nor deadj 
and its throbbing vitality tells of a life impulse 
and inspiration that are not of man. 

And, finally. 

This book inspires men for God. 

Every year books on morality and essays on 
conduct are written and published. They get as 
far as a first edition and are never heard of again ; 
but this book, which binds all its parts about the 
person, the work, the office and the glories of 
Christ, changes the life, the character, the time 
and the eternity of men. 

Place this book in the midst of the vilest and 
most abandoned community of desperate and 
devilish men and, sooner or later, you will hear a 
cry coming from the depths of sin and shame, bit- 
ter cries of repentance and yearnings after God; 
and by and by that community will be trans- 



154 Christ, Christian-ity akd the Bible 

formed, men will no longer be demon filled, but 
possessed with a spirit of truth and love; and God 
will be found to reign and rule in the midst. 

Whatever there is of sweetness and truth and 
righteousness in the world to-day; whatever there 
is that gives hope and comfort on earth and holds 
men back from very madness and despair, is due 
directly and indirectly to this book. 

Take up a map and find the lands where sin and 
vice skulk in the darkness ; where virtue is honored 
and purity enthroned; go mark on the map the 
lands where the men are the most manly and the 
women the most womanly, and you will find it in 
those lands where the Bible is exalted, not as the 
word of man, but, in deed and truth, as the Word 
of God. 

Find the men and women who know most of 
God, who have the deepest consciousness of him in 
the soul, and who walk every day with the assur- 
ance of his real presence — to whom the unseen be- 
comes from hour to hour the thing that is alone 
real — and who live as kings above their prostrate 
passions — and they will be those who make this 
book the supreme authority in their daily lives; 
who hear it when it speaks to them as the very 
voice of God. 

A book which thus inspires men for God is, in- 
deed, a book which, by every law of logic, must 
have been inspired hy God. 

From the evidence cited two things are appar- 
ent: 



The Bible 155 

1. The Bible is not sucli a book as a man would 
write if lie could. 

2. The Bible is not such a book as a man could 
write if he would. 

By these conclusions, therefore, the Bible is 
shown to be not of man. 

As the book is thus shown to be not of man — 
either by inclination or ability; and as from the 
beginning to the end its object is to glorify the 
unseen God in the revelation of his incarnate Son, 
then this book is of God; and being the utterance 
of his mind and will, is his Word; so that the 
statement of the apostle concerning it is justified. 
It is to be received as he says: ^^Not as the word 
of man, but as it is in truth, THE WOED OF 
GOD.'^ 

To him who so approaches it — ^who puts his 
shoes from off his feet as on holy ground, and with 
the silence of expectant faith listens and looks, it 
will disclose itself, speak to him, and so lay hold 
of the inner recesses of the heart that he shall 
know he has been face to face with God, has had 
glimpses of the delectable mountains and the city 
foursquare that lies beyond; from henceforth he 
shall walk, not as one in a vain show or in the 
mixing of darkness and light, but where the night 
shineth as the day; where the road is no longer 
paved with the stumbling stones of doubt, nor the 
signboards filled with a guess, but where the way 
leadeth on and up — shining more and more bright 
unto the perfect day. 



156 Cheist, Cheistianity and the Bible 

Take up this book, O friend. Do not read it 
with a hurried glance. Let thine eyes rest a while 
upon some single word, and if thou art patient, 
it will bud and blossom and bloom and grow unto 
thee as a tree of life; and the leaves shall be as 
medicine for the healing of thy hurt. Take it into 
thy mouth and learn a lesson from the meadow 
kine who chew the tender grasses, and turn them 
over, and chew them again, till they have extracted 
sweetness and life therefrom. Chew the words of 
this book over and over again (it is impossible 
to do so with any other book), meditate upon the 
words (to meditate, to reflect, are highest func- 
tions), mediate upon their meaning — ^upon their di- 
rect and cognate meanings; let the thoughts they 
suggest find full and free reaction in thy soul, and 
from some simple word or phrase thou shalt draw 
the sweetness of divine love, and more and more 
the consciousness that thou hast received into 
thine innermost being very spirit and very life. 

Bead it on bended knee. Take up the words and 
breathe on them with the warm breath of sincere 
desire to know their intent, and music will come 
forth as from the fabled horn of old — music that 
shall have in it all the hallelujahs and hosannas 
of the heavenly host. 

If you will take this book to your heart, you will 
find it bread such as kings' ovens never baked, 
water more crystal than that which bursts from 
mountain springs, wine the like of which was 
never pressed from purple grapes, meat which 



The Bible 157 

cattle on a thousand hills never furnished, and 
fruit no man ever gathered in royal gardens — the 
fruit of the Spirit. You will find it a lamp unto 
your feet and a light unto your path, a hammer 
for breaking the flinty rocks by the way, a fire 
that will burn out the stain of sin, and warm be- 
numbed fingers for quickened service in His Name. 

Give it the first place in your life. You will 
want to hear from it as the last thing when you 
go hence. The words of loved ones will be sweet 
in your ear as you leave these mortal shores (if 
our Lord Jesus Christ should not hasten his 
coming, you must go), but you will want to hear 
its utterance above all the tones, even of those you 
love, speaking the final word of hope and cheer 
to you. 

Be very patient with it. It has great things to 
say to you — and you will not always be fit to hear 
them. You will not always — at the first — be able 
to understand them ; but if you do not understand 
to-day, to-morrow, or other morrows after that, it 
will speak to you and you shall fully know. Per- 
haps it will wait till the unshed tears are in your 
heart, and the moan the common ear has never 
heard — then it will speak — p>rif{ the words will fall 
into the sore place of the soul, as though angel lips 
had touched it ; it will wait, perhaps, till the storm 
is high, and your frail craft (life's poor, frail 
craft) is tossed as though it would go down in the 
whelming waters (and the shore so far away), and 
then it will speak and say, ^^ Peace — be still, '* and 



158 Cheist, Christiaitity akd the Bible 

in that driven life of yours shall be a great and 
holy calm. 

Do not attempt to cross-qnestion it as though 
you hesitated to believe all it said. To accept 
some parts and reject others will be fatal to you. 
God does not reveal himself to those who doubt 
him. He that cometh to God must believe that he 
is, and that he is the rewarder of all them that 
diligently seek him. So must you approach this 
book — ^with reverence and submissive faith; for 
this book, friend ! is not the word of man, but in 
very truth— THE WOED OF GOD. 



WOV 9 1912 



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